In 2012, 3.45 million people were diagnosed with cancer and 1.75 million died of cancer.

With an ageing population, the burden that cancer will impose on our societies will increase.

Cancer has replaced cardiovascular disease as the leading cause of premature death in 28 of 53 European nations.

Counting 7 partners, 12 pilot sites and the European Cancer Patients Coalition, the Bench-Can project aims to improve quality of patient’s treatment.

In this framework, the Bench-Can project focuses on identifying how European providers can be assisted in order to improve services to patients, reduce care provision inequalities and how to raise the quality of oncologic services in Europe, in the light of a highly affecting cost-benefit analysis.

The partnership of the project challenges two key topics:

•  Ensuring active engagement of comprehensive cancer centres, clinical centres, cancer departments and units in Europe
• Sustaining quality of treatments and outcomes of the operating environments for health services which have to adapt to co-morbidities of an ageing population, speed of technology development and financial constraint and to differences in health systems performances within EU countries, where there is a concrete possibility for improvement.

Within these issues, the expected final outcomes are:

(i) Two benchmark tools planned for use in comprehensive cancer centres & cancer departments/units at general hospitals;

(ii) the identification of areas for improvement for quality of care & patient outcomes with advanced plans adopted by the pilot sites, at first, and by a broader audience in the coming years;

(iii) a benchmark manual with budget impact formulae for free access so to permit betterments in the management of cancer centres;

(iv) a roadmap for future assessments of comprehensive cancer care.

At the end of the project we expect the Bench-Can tools to be adopted as a non-profit service available to cancer centres and services across the EU.

The final results will be obtained thanks to the collaboration of the Pilot Sites which help to define:

•  The description of pilot site organisation with an agreed number of indicator sets describing the comprehensive care context
• The modelling performance of comprehensive cancer centres or cancer departments/units at general hospitals by several matrices (e.g. organisational objectives/intermediaries; staff/teams; intermediaries/services; services/patient outcome enablers; translational research or medicine-related data…).

Detailed analysis will be performed on all participating centres, for instance using data envelopment techniques and, in particular, visiting the centres with a restricted group of specialists in order to define and refine a final Benchmarking Tool that focuses on operations management and best clinical practice, which will be made available and applied to all interested Institutes in Europe.

Bench-Can Collaborating Partners

European Cancer Patients Coalition Brussels, Belgium

Institute of Oncology of Vilnius University Vilnius, Lithuania

The Netherlands Cancer Institute Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The Greater Poland Cancer Centre Poznan, Poland

Helsinki University Central Hospital Helsinki, Finland

Instituto Portugues de Oncologia do Porto Francisco Gentil Porto, Portugal

Fondazione Istituto Nazionale Tumori Milan, Italy

National Institute of Oncology Budapest, Hungary

The Oncology Institute, Cluj Napoca, Romania

King’s Health Partners Integrated Cancer Centre London, UK

National Centre for Tumor Diseases, Heidelberg, Germany

Centro di Riferimento Oncologico, Aviano, Pordenone, Italy.

For more information, please visit http://www.oeci.eu/Benchcan/

Source: OECI