EURECCA

• INSPIRE - International Nipple Sparing Mastectomy Registry
• The Role of resection of the primary tumour for asymptomatic incurable mestastatic colorectal cancer
• Adjuvant chemotherapy and relative survival of patients with stage II colon cancer
• Treatment strategies and relative survival of patients with stage I-III rectal cancer
• E-Learning CRC
• Hormone receptor-postive locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer who have received no prior endocrine therapy
• International Watch and Wait database (IWWD)
• Do enlarged lateral lymph nodes in rectal cancer after CRT lead to preventable lateral local recurrences ?
• AXISS Axillary Survey Study
• SURVAX+ Staging and Management of the Axilla in Neoadjuvant era Survey Study
• EU-MELACARE

Introduction

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EURECCA (acronym for EUropean REgistry of Cancer CAre or EURopEan CanCer Audit), started in 2007 as an ESSO initiative. EURECCA is an international multidisciplinary platform of clinicians and epidemiologists aiming to improve the quality of cancer care by data registration, feedback, forming plans for improvement and sharing knowledge of performance and science. EURECCA is registered as a foundation, based in Leiden.

Relevant background: Still considerable variation exists in Europe in cancer management and outcome. Moreover, there is an urgent need for transparent uniform international data collection and analysis, in order to monitor and learn from all aspects of cancer care and to provide feedback and education. Uniform datasets are necessary, not existent yet.

The vision - EURECCA will become the trademark for quality assurance in cancer management in Europe, and provide a dedicated infrastructure to audit patient outcome, monitor standardized cancer care and assure equal access for cancer patients to high quality care in all European countries. Synergy with the epidemiological network to collaboratively reach common goals is actively pursued to form one front. Web-based dashboard with highly secured information on performance and enhancement proposals are future perspectives.

The mission of EURECCA is achieving and assuring high quality of multidisciplinary cancer management in Europe, accessible to all patients through the development and support of an international quality assurance structure, which is an audit structure, using anonymous patient data and compliant with national and international laws.

EURECCA’s goal is to enlarge the European platform and infrastructure to cooperate with national registries or audit structures, expand the coverage of cancer patient outcome data that is captured and audit the quality of multidisciplinary cancer care. Registration of outcome-based quality measurements will provide internal feed-back, benchmarking as well as transparency which will rapidly lead to improvements in cancer care.

EURECCA’s key activities focus on
1. Building a professional support structure
2. Increase EURECCA network and optimize ICT structure for data collection and processing, auditing
3. Development of cancer treatment guidelines, education and communication
4. Fundraising and income generation.

EURECCA has an internationally recognized set of expertise to augment quality assurance in cancer care and access to expertise, and a large network all of value to stakeholders such as physicians, scientific societies, patient organizations, policy makers and pharma:

• Data collection, large database mining, study facilitation and processing of data. Analysis with SPSS, STATA, SAS, excel etc. Epidemiologists and statisticians who are specialized in this field of merging different data bases
• Defining uniform datasets
• Reporting to all contacts from cancer registries and/or national or regional audits. Writing manuscripts in collaborating with participants on the results of the analysis
• Organising international consensus conferences, symposia and meeting with the Board per tumour site group
• Education (development of e-learning multidisciplinary educational program/workshops), assisting in guideline formation and writing patient friendly summaries. Active patient involvement in improvement of cancer care
• Support multidisciplinary cancer care, integrated care pathways
• Organise international collaboration in pioneering treatments to improve cancer care and outcome analysis (such as non-surgical Wait&Watch after upfront CRT)