Improving the outcome of colorectal cancer: the European Registration of Cancer Care (EURECCA) project

SUMMARY Colorectal cancer is one of the most common types of cancers. Although there have been several improvements in screening, staging and treatment in recent decades, differences in the quality of care between European countries remain. Quality control on surgery, radiotherapy and pathology have been introduced in trials, followed by incorporation into general care. Another option is an audit structure in which hospitals and clinicians can also improve their results by learning from their own outcome statistics and those from colleagues treating a similar patient group. Although all these audit structures have achieved excellent results, differences in outcomes between European countries remain. To reduce the differences between the countries, an international, multidisciplinary, outcome-based quality improvement program has been initiated – European Registration of Cancer Care. One of the next steps will be to use the European Registration of Cancer Care data set to perform research on subgroups, suc...