Tamsin Nash is beginning the third year of her Clinical Research Training Fellow in TRACC programme at the University of Edinburgh. Her research explores socioeconomic and ethnic disparities in the quality of cancer care. But what do we mean by “quality of care” – how is it actually defined within health systems, and what metrics of inequality already exist? Tamsin’s new paper, “Use of Routine Quality Metrics to Describe Disparities in Cancer Care: a Narrative Review and Thematic Analysis”, explores these questions by examining how routinely collected data are translated into measures of quality, using cancer audit frameworks from G7 countries.
The review brought together more than 500 individual measures of care, exploring common themes and considering the capacity of audit frameworks to assess socioeconomic and ethnic disparities. While many frameworks included measures relevant to equity and patient centred care, measures that directly support monitoring and addressing inequalities – such as reporting performance separately across population groups, or equity-focused interventions – were less common. The findings highlight areas where quality frameworks could play a bigger role in monitoring inequalities – but this would require careful interpretation, safeguards and supportive governance when comparing outcomes between groups.
Read the full paper in the Journal of Cancer Policy: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcpo.2026.100797