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Life sciences · Journal article
New Zealand Medical Journal · September 23, 2026
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background: Lung cancer is immensely complex and resource-intensive to treat. Much of this burden falls to our public healthcare system; however, we currently do not know how much treatment we are providing for our most deadly cancer. Here we describe volumes of publicly funded surgery, radiation and systemic therapy delivered to New Zealanders with lung cancer. methods: We identified all lung cancers registered on the New Zealand Cancer Registry from 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2021 (n=16,850). We linked cases to national treatment data, including inpatient, outpatient and pharmaceutical datasets. We counted the volume of treatment received over a 2-year window from diagnosis and determined treatment per year of diagnosed cases. We also determined the average treatment received per diagnosed case, and per treated case. results: For each year of new lung cancer diagnoses, our public system delivered 978 surgical-days of lung cancer–specific surgery, 11,027 attendance-days of radiation therapy and 9,108 dispensings of systemic therapy over the 2-year window following diagnosis. Each treated person received an average of 1.5 surgical-days of cancer-specific surgery, 11.5 attendance-days of radiation therapy and 11.8 dispensings of systemic therapy, mostly intravenous chemotherapy. There were no obvious differences in average treatment by ethnicity. conclusions: With the number of lung cancer diagnoses projected to increase over time, the volume of treatment delivered by our system will need to increase beyond the levels reported here. Among other actions, New Zealand must return to our world-leading tobacco cessation pathway to curb the significant future pressure caused by this common, complex and lethal cancer.