This year in Aotearoa New Zealand, approximately 3,500 people will be diagnosed with breast cancer and approximately 650 people will die from it. While we have seen steady improvements in breast cancer survival over the last few decades, there are still barriers in access to high quality care and variations in how care is delivered and received across the motu/country.
As part of our ongoing work to support the improvement of breast cancer care and outcomes for people and whānau, we are pleased to release the Breast Cancer Quality Improvement Monitoring Report 2025, and two supporting documents: the Breast Cancer Quality Performance Indicator Descriptions and the Breast Cancer Quality Performance Indicator Technical Specifications.
This monitoring report provides results for ten quality performance indicators (QPIs) for the 8,390 people with a new primary diagnosis of breast cancer in Aotearoa New Zealand from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021. The QPIs were calculated using data from Te Rēhita Mate Ūtaetate – Breast Cancer Foundation National Register (Te Rēhita). This data can also be viewed in our Cancer Care Data Explorer.
The report highlights variations in detection, diagnosis and treatment between districts (formerly district health boards) and demographic groups, such as age, rural-urban status, ethnicity and socioeconomic deprivation.
The intent is for the results to be used to inform improvements in how breast cancer services are organised, resourced, and accessed by patients. It is important to note that the scope of needed improvements extends beyond the cancer care system and includes other key factors like access to primary care, enablers to access services like screening and treatment (such as assistance to travel for treatment and support for organising time off work or childcare, to attend appointments). Therefore, improvements across the QPIs in this report will require a system wide approach.
Thank you
We would like to thank the Breast Cancer NZ Foundation Register Trust for providing the source data and working with the agency to develop the technical specifications and undertake the calculations for the breast cancer QPIs. We also thank the Breast Cancer Foundation NZ, as the funder of Te Rēhita, for supporting this work.
We also thank the members of the breast cancer QPI working group; without their time and expertise we would not have been able to produce this report and related documents.
Next release from the quality performance indicator programme
To date, we have reported on cancer-specific QPIs for bowel, lung, prostate and pancreatic cancers, along with people who are diagnosed with cancer within 30 days of an emergency or acute (unplanned) hospital admission for 22 cancer types. which are available on our website. The next QPI report will be an update on the findings against the original lung cancer QPIs.
