Abstract
Disease-specific cancer registries have become an essential part of modern oncology. Across health systems, they are regarded as fundamental infrastructure for benchmarking, service planning, and clinical governance. Their outputs inform guidelines, shape policy, and increasingly underpin expectations of transparency and accountability. In this context, registries are often assumed to improve the quality of care they measure. While there is no question that registries generate data, the assumption that this somehow translates to improved patient care, while intuitively appealing, is largely unproven and rarely questioned.