Has Institute Jules Bordet been accredited as a member of the OECI?
Like a comprehensive cancer centre accredited by the OECI it’s very, very nice news for us because we put a lot of energy into all the quality processes in the hospitals. All the personnel of the institution have really tried to build all these quality processes all together and it’s so nice and we are very proud of this new.
How is your approach to cancer different from that of a smaller hospital?
First we are concentrating a lot of cancer patients for different types which really important for research, for care and also for the professionals to be educated well enough to keep the expertise and to be trained on new technologies and new treatment about cancer. So I don’t know if you know about the OECI accreditation project and programme, it’s in fact a programme that means to see if the quality standards created by the OECI are really well done in the centre. You have to auto-evaluate yourself in front of all the standards and then there is an audit, a peer review, by some director of another centre of the OECI with other auditors from other centres that come in the centre to see if you have well done your auto-evaluation. So it was a very nice dynamic that we put into the hospital, it was really good because everybody wants to improve and it was a very nice experience.
How many OECI accredited centres are there?
We will have ten accredited centres and 27 have entered the programme, so among them ten have been accredited.
How does a centre become accredited?
I think that multidisciplinarity is very important, integration of research to care, education, innovation. All this has to be concentrated into the same place and well organised in a similar objective and that’s very important to get this good organisation and co-ordination. Also important is the collaboration with other centres, the creation of networks in order to spread and communicate on what you are doing, collaboration for research and also keep the patients in the centre of the interest.
We have a very, very big new project we are rebuilding the hospital but not here on site. We are moving on a campus from the Université libre de Bruxelles, close to the general academic hospital so the campus will have the general academic hospital, the cancer centre and also the faculty of medicine. So for us it’s very important because we will be more close to the laboratory and surely the fundamental laboratory that we need to really collaborate much more in that field.
