Essential Requirements for Quality Cancer Care: Colorectal Cancer

The information presented in this paper provides a comprehensive description of the essential requirements for establishing a high-quality colorectal cancer service.

Facts and Requirements

• Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second most common cause of cancer death in Europe and has wide variation in outcomes among countries. Increasing numbers of older people are contracting the disease, and treatments for advanced stages are becoming more complex. A growing number of survivors also require specialist support.
  
  
• The information presented in the Essential Requirements for Quality Cancer Care: Colorectal Cancer paper provides a comprehensive description of the essential requirements for establishing a high-quality CRC service. The ERQCC expert group is aware that it is not possible to propose a ‘one size fits all’ system for all countries, but urges that access to multidisciplinary units or centres must be guaranteed for all those with CRC.
  
  
• High-quality care can only be a carried out in specialised CRC units or centres which have both a core multidisciplinary team and an extended team of allied professionals, and which are subject to quality and audit procedures. Such units or centres are far from universal in all European countries.
  
  
• It is essential that, to meet European aspirations for comprehensive cancer control, healthcare organisations implement the essential requirements in this paper, paying particular attention to multidisciplinarity and patient-centred pathways from diagnosis, to treatment, to survivorship.