What we do

The ICP philosophy is to frame global cancer as a complex adaptive system, and through rigorous and novel research and analysis deliver high quality, actionable intelligence to policy makers at all levels – global, national and local.

Our approach allows us to triangulate cancer research, care, and education using a wide variety of novel qualitative and quantitative methods to study the cancer policy cycle.

In particular our ability to study trends and current activity across huge ranges of global cancer puts us in a unique position to predict near and medium term trajectories, and how these will intersect with other socio-economic and socio-political policy issues, such as economics (affordability), social perceptions, and changes to regulatory policy.

Policy is derived from:

  • Direction (what is the key issue to be addressed?)
  • Collection (collation of high quality information from multiple sources)
  • Analysis (what are interdependencies between the information, what context do we need to set them in?)
  • Dissemination (accurately framed analysis, provided in the right way to the right people at the right time)
Why is Cancer Policy so important

Cancer is one of the most serious threats to global health in both developed, high-income countries and emerging economies. The ageing and growing world population coupled to increased exposure to modifiable risk factors such as tobacco means is creating a cancer tsunami.

Cancer is also a highly complex genetic disease to treat, with over 200 major types and the research effort spans all known domains of science from the most fundamental genetic research to population, behavioural and socio-economic studies.

To address the challenge of global cancer control and cure politicians, patient organisations, research funders, and healthcare professionals need access to high quality public policy intelligence.

Our Methods

The Institute of Cancer Policy draws on a highly distinguished international senior faculty for its research and policy development expertise. The ICP uses novel public policy research methodologies to study cancer public policy issues and deliver impact, for example:

  • cultural transmission tools
  • e-analysis of the virtual community (what is being reported on the internet, by whom and how)
  • key opinion leader analysis using novel social science methods
  • scientometrics (from bibilometrics)
  • community & network analysis (we have access to a huge range of patient organisation, research and care communities)
  • public-media analysis (drawing on analysis of FACTIVA databases of media reporting couple to public opinion surveys)
  • econometric (with our research partners at Health Economics Research Centre at University of Oxford)
  • organisational analysis / socio-ecology to inform cultural strategies
  • transformation (process, flow analysis etc), user involvement techniques and OD (ATPI, neuro-linguistic)
  • medical and social anthropology to study the culture framing of policy issues.

The ICP has developed major networks across the global cancer community, which allows us to ‘deep dive’ policy research to ensure its validity and impact in the real world.