National Bowel Cancer Screening Program monitoring report 2026

Cancer survivorship focuses on the health and life of a person diagnosed with cancer after treatment until the end of life (NCI 2025). It is more than simply not dying from cancer; it focuses on living with, and life after, a cancer diagnosis (Jackson et al. 2013). Survivorship covers the physical, psychosocial, and economic issues of cancer, including the later effects of treatment, secondary cancers, and quality of life (NCI 2025).

Prevalence is the number of people alive (surviving) after a diagnosis of cancer. At the end of 2021, there were 55,995 Australians alive who had been diagnosed with bowel cancer in the previous 5 years and 95,238 who had been diagnosed in the previous 10 years (Table 2.1). When limited to people aged 50–74 at the end of 2021, there were 28,916 alive after being diagnosed with bowel cancer in the previous 5 years and 47,138 after being diagnosed in the previous 10 years (Table 2.1).

Source: AIHW Australian Cancer Database (ACD) 2021.