1422 Quality—to assure or improve? Achieving the goals in cancer nursing care

Nursing initiatives at the European level to explore issues relating to quality will be identified and reviewed. Particular attention will be paid to the establishment and subsequent activities of EUROQUAN–the European Association for Quality Assurance in Nursing—and its impact in raising awareness about quality issues in nursing across national frontiers. Methods for evaluating quality and developing standards in nursing will be briefly outlined and their application to cancer nursing discussed. Examples of recent developments in France will be used to demonstrate how these processes have been applied in practice. It will be shown that traditional quality assurance methods have not been entirely successful in their application in France and the reasons for this will be explained. It will be argued further that for France a system of continuous quality improvement has been shown to offer the greatest potential for success. The principal elements of continuous quality improvement will be described and examples of its successful implementation in the Francophone countries of Western Europe will be given.