ECC 2015
What is the European cancer accreditation programme?
Anke Wind, M.P.H - Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, Netherlands
What is a European cancer accreditation programme?
The accreditation programme that we used for this study is the OECI accreditation programme, so the Organisation of European Cancer Institutes, and they decided some years ago that it would be good to have a European accreditation programme. They look at different facets of the cancer centre both from a quantitative point of view as a qualitative point of view. It’s an accreditation and designation programme, actually, so centres can be designated as either a comprehensive cancer centre or any other type of cancer centre.
How did you conduct the survey?
I didn’t conduct it myself but the main author did but I understood of it was that she actually selected eight centres that already went through the accreditation process or were in the middle of it and she wanted to speak to at least four stakeholders from each centre so she tried to invite one researcher, one clinician, one manager and one nurse. She just invited… I don’t know how she got contacts but she tried to invite at least four persons per institute and conduct the interviews with them. I don’t think everybody responded but at the end she got quite a good sample from the eight centres.
What were the main perceptions of the staff in the participating centres?
Like mentioned in the article as well, I think especially nurses were quite happy with the accreditation because before they felt that they were not being taken seriously that much and they were not having a very big role. After the accreditation that role got much bigger. So especially nurses, they were quite satisfied with that because they felt that their position was much more professionalised after it. Another thing that was very clear was that multidisciplinary team organisation, especially, became much better because that was a remark of the review was that the organisation of the multidisciplinary teams was not very well. I think this is something that the staff felt really improved after doing an accreditation like this. Those are probably the main… there were four in total but I think these were the main, important ones.
What is the take-home message from the study?
I think that accreditation is becoming a very important tool in terms of quality improvement, of continuous quality improvement, within cancer care but within healthcare in general. But I do think it’s important to look at what are the effects of it because accreditations are quite costly, both in time and resources, and if they don’t bring you any benefit they’re not really worth doing it. So I think there should be probably more research in how effective accreditations are because this is a very good first step to see are people in the institute actually happy with doing an accreditation. I think the message is yes, they’re happy with it. Not all stakeholder groups were as happy with it but I think the message would be accreditation is working but to really prove that it’s working more research will be needed on this topic.
