The ECIBC Guidelines Platform for all breast care processes - With specific reference on sustainability and stakeholder involvement

Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer in Europe and accounts for 16.3% of female cancer deaths in Europe, being thus a major health problem. Improvements in the quality of care, in particular increasing the adherence to evidence-based guidelines/recommendations, are therefore welcome. Within the European Commission's Initiative on Breast Cancer (ECIBC), guidelines addressing breast cancer screening and diagnosis, henceforth mentioned as the European Breast Guidelines, are being developed by the Guidelines Development Group (GDG) under the coordination of the JRC Healthcare Quality Team. However, in order to cover all care processes, the guidelines developed by the GDG need to be complemented by the ECIBC Guidelines Platform (later referred to as the Guidelines Platform or platform) that will contain guidelines and recommendations for all breast care processes with main focus on those on treatment, rehabilitation, follow-up and palliative care. For the Guidelines Platform, breast cancer guidelines produced by different entities and stakeholder organisations, such as professional societies, have been searched from all publicly available sources. To be as inclusive as possible, also a public call for guidelines was organised. The identified evidence-based guidelines and those submitted by different stakeholder organizations (altogether more than 250 guidelines) are to be evaluated for their quality, clinical impact, geographical coverage and sustainability. Only those trustworthy guidelines fulfilling the carefully defined eligibility criteria will be included in the Guidelines Platform to be hosted in the ECIBC website. These guidelines - in addition to the European Breast Guidelines - will also become reference documents for the voluntary European quality assurance scheme for breast cancer services, henceforth mentioned as European QA scheme. Besides supporting the European QA scheme, the Guidelines Platform can be foreseen as a valuable resource of guidelines for professionals, policy makers, researchers, guidelines developers, as well as for citizens and patients. The ultimate impact of the Guidelines Platform would be to reduce unnecessary variability in healthcare services and hence contribute to improve the outcomes of breast cancer patients in terms of morbidity, mortality, and quality of life.JRC.F.1-Health in Societ