Benchmarking cancer screening worldwide: Harmonised data collection through CanScreen5 project
Eric Lucas, Mary Luz Rol, David Ritchie, Richard Muwonge, Partha Basu, CanScreen5 and CanScreen?ECIS contributors

Introduction
Effective cancer screening requires strong governance, robust organisation, and rigorous quality assurance. To support countries in evaluating and strengthening their programmes, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has developed two complementary global resources as part of its flagship project CanScreen5:
the IARC cancer screening data hub, a multilingual, harmonised platform for systematic collection and analysis of cancer screening performance data; and
Global mapping of essential and desirable elements, designed to assess the maturity of screening programmes for cervical, breast, colorectal, and lung cancers.Together, these tools respond to the diversity of health systems worldwide and enable structured, comparable assessments across countries.

Methods
Countries contribute structured qualitative and quantitative data via standardised tools available in several languages. These instruments capture essential and desirable elements of organized cancer screening programmes across domains including governance, service delivery, referral pathways, information systems, and quality assurance.
The mapping framework defines key “essential” elements (e.g., government endorsement, defined target population, dedicated budget, standardised data collection) and “desirable” elements (e.g., active invitation systems, electronic tracking with unique identifiers, linkage with population?based cancer registries, routine audits, and performance reporting).
The Data Hub integrates dashboards, factsheets, and benchmarking reports to support both self?assessment through estimation of key performance indicators and external comparison.
Development and Global Implementation
The Data Hub was initially piloted through the CanScreen?ECIS project in collaboration with EU Member States, demonstrating feasibility in harmonising data collection across Europe. Building on this success, the platform was expanded globally via CanScreen5, and is now used by more than 120 countries, enabling wide?scale mapping of programme maturity and facilitating international comparisons.

Results
The global mapping reveals substantial variability in programme organisation and quality:
Essential elements for cervical and breast screening are present in many countries, whereas desirable elements—such as active invitation and robust electronic information systems—are less widely implemented.
Linkage to cancer registries and routine audits remain uncommon, particularly for colorectal and lung cancer screening.
Integrated visualisation and benchmarking tools allow countries and regions to identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities for targeted improvement.The Data Hub now supports aggregation of datasets across CanScreen5, EU Cancer Information System (ECIS), the EU 3rd report on cancer screening implementation, EU-GAINS project, EUCanScreen project, WHO breast and cervical cancer initiatives, and World Endoscopy Organization (WEO) offering a unified global repository.

Conclusions
The combined use of the IARC Cancer Screening Data Hub and the CanScreen5 global mapping approach provides a powerful, harmonised framework for evaluating cancer screening programme maturity worldwide. By enabling structured data collection, cross?country benchmarking, and identification of gaps, these tools strengthen national and regional capacity for evidence?based screening policy and accelerate progress towards WHO and EU cancer control targets.
For more information, see CanScreen5 – The Global Cancer Screening Data Repository (https://canscreen5.iarc.fr/).