Quality assurance in medical oncology within the EORTC. European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer.

Quality assurance (QA) lately arrived in the medical arena in comparison to other fields. EORTC focused initially its attention on the aspects related to clinical trial data handling. In the late 1980s, the EORTC appointed a Quality Control Committee (QCC) with the remit to expand the QA activities to the main disciplines involved in cancer treatment. From 1990 to 1996, two projects supported by the European Commission enabled the QCC to address, amongst others, specific questions related to medical oncology. Both projects focused on the practices of chemotherapy delivery and the quality of data reporting. Following these projects, the QCC developed standard guidelines to advise on chemotherapy delivery and also a systemic chemotherapy checklist to enable an easy collection of essential data onto the patient's files. More recently, the EORTC QA Committee proposed a minimal set of quality control procedures to be implemented by all EORTC groups.