Published: Thursday 5th June 2025
This report presents an analysis of individual levels of deprivation and socio-demographic characteristics, including ethnicity and overcrowding, using data available in SAIL Databank. For the first time, cancer registry data have been linked to data from the 2011 Census in England and Wales. This gives us a new, granular snapshot of the socio-demographic profile of people diagnosed with cancer in Wales. This is vital in reducing inequalities and inequities, and in planning prevention and services for future generations in Wales. Following the work in this report, further work is recommended to fully understand the impact of these socio-demographic characteristics on cancer incidence, in addition to other possible factors.
Public Health Wales’ annual official cancer statistics are usually only able to present inequalities for people in Wales’ characteristics based on age and biological sex. Routinely, for various measures of deprivation, we can only assign people to a level of socio-economic deprivation based on the area in which they live rather than looking at individual characteristics. This may not necessarily reflect their personal level of inequity or deprivation, meaning area-level analysis of cancer incidence deprivation can lose detail. The linkage in this analysis has enabled us to look at individual or household measures of inequality.
The collaboration was led by the Swansea University Population Data Science group, under the direction of the Welsh Government Technical Advisory Cell (TAC) and includes the following groups and organisations: the SAIL Databank, Health Data Research UK (HDR UK), Administrative Data Research (ADR) Wales, Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW, formerly NHS Wales Informatics Service (NWIS)), Public Health Wales, NHS Shared Services and the Welsh Ambulance Services University NHS Trust (WAST).
Read the full publication here.
