All physicians, all hospitals and other institutions in the country must send a notification to Finnish Cancer Registry of all cancer cases that come to their attention. Some pathological, cytological and haematological laboratories still send the respective laboratory notification filled in manually but majority of laboratory notifications are currently automatically extracted from laboratory data systems, using a standard format defined by the Finnish Cancer Registry. In addition, Statistics Finland sends of all death certificates where cancer is mentioned.
The cancer notifications submitted to the Finnish Cancer Registry are immediately stored to the database that contains data on virtually all cancers diagnosed since 1953 in Finland. This data base is used for statistical and research purposes.
