OBJECTIVE: The objective of this work is to describe the epidemiological and clinical characteristics and to determine the prognostic factors for survival of patients with cancers priority in the Lambayeque Essalud Social Security to 2007-2010. METHODS: We realized a retrospective cohort analytic study in patients using hospital cancer registry. They were analyzed with ANOVA to compare means and Kaplan-Meier log rank test comparing them. For the prognostic factors we used Cox regression to calculate hazard ratios. We used a significance level of P<0.05. RESULTS: For each additional year of age the risk of death increases by 3.6%. The service time of treatment (P<0.05), diagnosis (P<0.05) and baseline (P<0.05) decreased comparing 2007 to 2010. The survival curves in the reference time (log rank <0.05) and treatment (log rank <0.05). Patients with colon cancer are 2.7 times greater risk (HR: 2.7 95% CI 1.5 to 5.1) of dying, while women with breast cancer have 62% lower risk of dying (HR: 0.38 95% CI 0.21 to 0.67) compared with women with cervical cancer. CONCLUSIONS: The number of incident and prevalent cases of cancer has increased from 2007 to 2010. Service times (time of treatment, diagnostic and reference) have decreased in 2010 by reference to the 2007. Survival was found to be associated reference time and lower the standard treatment. The prognostic factors found were: treatment time, age, education level, primary cancer type, histological grade of differentiation.