Global cancer rates are rising. How are countries reacting?
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National cancer control plans (NCCPs) — government-led strategies that outline how a country will manage cancer care across its population — are becoming increasingly popular around the world. By providing a holistic view of national priorities, timelines and funding strategies in the areas of prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment and research, these plans can form the backbone of a country’s long-term approach to cancer.
According to a review1 of global NCCPs by the International Cancer Control Partnership (ICCP), a global collaboration of organizations that support cancer-control planning efforts, 72 new or updated plans were launched between 2018 and 2023. European and African countries, which contributed 27 and 13 of the 72 new plans, respectively, had the most notable growth in NCCP numbers during this period (see ‘Global growth’).
A country typically designs its NCCPs according to its own health system, cancer burden and policy priorities. However, most of these plans are influenced by international guidance, such as from the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC), a founding member of the ICCP, which provides frameworks and recommendations for what effective NCCPs should include.
In its periodic reviews of global NCCPs, the ICCP and its collaborators have highlighted some of the most common weaknesses. For example, in 2023, only 27% of NCCPs globally were costed to carry out their plan. This means that roughly three-quarters of all NCCPs are essentially statements of intent, says Yannick Romero, senior knowledge and advocacy manager at the UICC in Geneva, Switzerland and co-author of the review.
“You need the money; you need to know who is going to finance it,” he says. “You need to get a country’s ministry of health to align with its ministry of finance.”
Consulting with cancer survivors and advocacy groups to ensure that their thoughts and opinions inform the vision and priorities of an NCCP is another challenge that many countries do not meet, says Romero (see ‘Seeking input’). “It’s really important to bring the patient’s voice to the table when you’re writing an NCCP. They have lived experience.”
Common weaknesses
Another common weakness in NCCPs is consistency — not within the plan itself, but in a country’s commitment to maintaining, updating and implementing it.
In the United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have their own plans for cancer management. Scotland and Northern Ireland have active NCCPs that each cover a 10-year period. Wales currently has a more limited ‘Cancer Improvement Plan’, which followed an NCCP that expired in 2023 (see ‘UK cancer plans’).
England, whose National Health Service (NHS) is the United Kingdom’s largest health system, let its NCCP lapse in 2020, replacing it with a shorter-term plan that included strategies for six major health conditions, including cancer. In February this year, it released a new plan for the period 2026 to 2035.
England has made significant progress in some cancer outcomes, having contributed to the United Kingdom’s 11% reduction in people dying from cancer over the past decade, according to data from Cancer Research UK in London. But it is falling behind other nations in key areas. In 2025, around 1.29 million people in England were on the waiting list for radiology and endoscopic cancer scans — the highest numbers since 2006, the UK government reports. Long waits are also common in other parts of the cancer pathway; in 2022, English patients were almost three times more likely to wait for more than 104 days for cancer treatment after a referral than they were in 2017, according to Cancer Research UK.
England’s health-care system, like many around the world, has been strained by the COVID-19 pandemic, staffing shortages and ageing infrastructure, which has made it harder to improve cancer outcomes in the past few years2. “That’s why you need an NCCP,” says Mark Lawler, chair in translational cancer genomics at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. “It puts a structure on how we deliver cancer care, cancer prevention, cancer diagnosis and cancer research.”
Nature Index 2026 Cancer