Hospital-Based Cancer Registry Audit of the Clínica Sagrada Esperança, Luanda, Angola
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34635/rpc.1180Keywords:
Cancer registry, Data quality audit, Oncology, Epidemiology, AngolaAbstract
Introduction and Objectives: Luanda faces a growing cancer burden alongside a high prevalence of communicable diseases, yet lacks a population-based cancer registry. The Clinica Sagrada Esperanca (CSE), a semi-private institution in Luanda, maintains a hospital-based cancer registry (CSE-HBCR) through a manual data curation process with recognized limitations. This study aimed to (1) perform a structured quality audit of the CSE-HBCR database and (2) establish a descriptive cancer profile of cases diagnosed and/or treated at the institution.
Methods: The study included 1,113 records registered at the CSE-HBCR between 2012 and 2025. The audit systematically assessed missing values, invalid entries, temporal, logical, and internal consistency, textual variability, and duplicate records. Following data curation, a descriptive analysis was performed to characterize the cancer profile.
Results: The audit identified 8,851 missing values (31.8% of all expected fields), with the highest proportions in clinical (57.9%) and follow-up (35.0%) variables. Additional quality issues included invalid entries, age discrepancies between recorded and calculated values (402 cases), sex-tumour incompatibilities (8 cases), high textual variability in key variables, and 50 duplicate records. After deduplication, 1,094 cancer cases were analysed. The most frequent cancers were prostate (29.4% of male cases) and breast (37.6% of female cases). Staging information was absent in 71.9% of cases.
Conclusions: This first comprehensive audit of the CSE-HBCR reveals critical data quality deficiencies that compromise the registry's usefulness for cancer surveillance and research. Implementing standardized protocols—including the adoption of ICD-O-3 coding, the CanReg5 software platform, and a structured quality improvement plan—is essential to strengthen the registry of hospitals that treat cancer in Luanda and support the future Luanda Population-Based Cancer Registry.
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