We are happy to announce that Dr Jozsef Lovey, a present member of the Accreditation Committee and Medical Director of the National Institute of Oncology in Budapest, has agreed to chair the Committee, in succession to Prof Gunnar Saeter.  Gunnar has done an amazing job over the last 6 years, streamlining the committee’s work at a time of strong growth in the programme, and providing robust and detailed advice on accreditation decisions to the Accreditation & Designation Board.

The Covid-19 virus has a major impact on the way everyone works. This also applies to the work for the Accreditation and Designation programme of the OECI.

This spring, the audit for the Cancer Centre in Reggio Emilia was cancelled in a hurry after it became clear that the number of Covid-19 patients in the northern provinces of Italy was rapidly increasing at the end of February. The number of Covid-19 cases also increased rapidly in the rest of Europe.

To help cancer centres implement a quality system for cancer care, OECI has developed standards and a peer review system. These standards are revised every 5 years. The revision process is a meticulous process, where we evaluate each standard, while also looking at new developments in cancer care.

The OECI Accreditation & Designation (A&D) Programme launched its second version of the revised standards and procedures, as described in Manual 3.0, in December 2019. The Manual can be downloaded from our website (oeci.eu/accreditation).

The OECI A&D Board is proud to inform you that The Lancet Oncology has accepted our article '100 European consensus Quality Standards for Cancer Centres'. The article sets out the robust process by which OECI consulted many experts and arrived at a consensus of core quality standards (100 in number) which should become standard in European cancer centres to achieve high quality care, research and education.

When working on the revision of the standards in 2019, the OECI A&D Board decided to consider changing the indicator for the Percentage of patients included in clinical trials. This was based on remarks made during the session during the Oncology Days in June 2019 in Bari, indicating that the definition did not take into account some developments related to biomarker-driven studies. However, after evaluating the first preliminary designations, the OECI A&D Board has concluded that the new definition for Manual 3.

As our centres were dealing with the COVID-19 situation, OECI decided in March to postpone all planned site visits until Autumn 2020. In the past weeks the OECI A&D Board has investigated alternatives to start up the A&D Programme, which protect health professionals, patients and the OECI auditors and co-ordinators. .

In September 2020 the OECI A&D Programme will continue with hybrid virtual peer reviews.