Australian Indigenous HealthReviews From the Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet Impact on Indigenous people

The impact of cancer on Indigenous people often attracts much less attention than it deserves, for two main reasons. First, the level of identification of Indigenous people in cancer notifications is known to be poor [1, 2]. There are currently no national data on cancer incidence in Indigenous Australians due to poor data quality in several jurisdictions and for those Indigenous patients who are registered, there is concern that not all are correctly identified as Indigenous [2]. Identification of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is not yet included on pathology forms and the extent to which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cancer patients are identified in hospital inpatient statistics varies across Australia [3] but Indigenous identification in the registries has been improving [4]. Second, the fact that cancer has often been reported in terms of the proportions of deaths it causes (19 % of Indigenous deaths compared with around 30 % of non-Indigenous deaths in Australia [5]), rather than by rates, has tended to give the erroneous impression that cancer does not have a great impact among Indigenous people. Alternative analyses, however, suggest that there are around 45 % more cancer deaths among Indigenous Australians than expected on the basis of non-Indigenous rates [1