Draft Midterm Evaluation of the Fourth Cancer Control Plan

The council was held in a hybrid format on June 18, 2026, and the draft midterm evaluation report for the Fourth Cancer Control Promotion Basic Plan was the main agenda item.

The draft report consists of four chapters: the purpose of the Fourth Plan, the purpose of the midterm evaluation, the midterm evaluation, and “Conclusion: Toward the Fifth Basic Plan,” organizing progress by field and future challenges.

The evaluation results organized progress and issues requiring additional action concerning cancer prevention, cancer care, living with cancer, and the infrastructure supporting them, with certain overall achievements and improving trends recognized.

For patients and families, it will be important to improve access to second opinions before treatment, clinical trials, standard treatment, palliative care, and consultation support, and to identify and support financial and employment-related burdens.

Medical institutions and related academic societies and organizations will be expected to advance collaboration among hospitals, highly complex surgery, cancer genomic medicine, and the placement of specialized personnel while balancing standardization and centralization.

In policy management, it will be necessary to analyze the factors behind regional disparities and patient travel and treatment access, not only national figures, and to improve measures based on needs that are difficult to capture through quantitative indicators alone and on qualitative information.

The evaluation presented a list of determinations for all indicators related to individual targets. For field-specific outcomes, it included all indicators, while for intermediate outcomes and outputs, it included core indicators and indicators rated C or showing a declining trend. Because the questionnaires and response options changed between the second and third patient experience surveys, the relevant indicators were marked with an asterisk and were not interpreted as simple improvement or decline.

Potential areas for addition or strengthening included individualized recommendations for cancer screening, recommendations to undergo cancer screening tailored to employment status, information on second opinions before treatment, sharing successful practices among prefectures, prompt collaboration between hospitals and clinics and among hospitals, access to clinical trials, standardization of expert panels, and nutritional therapy and rehabilitation for older adults.

Toward the Fifth Plan, the indicated direction was to reconsider the creation of indicators for items not yet established, the relationship between targets and measures in the logic model, data sources, evaluation methods for each indicator, and the setting of target values and certain standards, while ensuring continuity in indicators and evaluation methods during the Fourth Plan.

Committee members called for adding an explanation of the logic model to the report, increasing the implementation rate of routine HPV vaccination, addressing drug lags and drug loss, carefully evaluating the number of pediatric cancer specialists, and including economic and employment-related indicators, the use of AI, long-term follow-up, and basic palliative care.