Current and emerging radiotherapy priorities
As a standing committee of CAPCA, CPQR sustains and advances radiotherapy quality and safety improvements and collaborates with the professional associations and partner organizations whose contributions are essential to this effort. This ongoing work includes:
- Incident reporting: A key element of radiation treatment quality assurance is learning from potential and actual incidents that occur during treatment planning and delivery. CAPCA will maintain a partnership with the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) on the National System of Incident Reporting – Radiation Treatment (NSIR-RT), a pan-Canadian system for reporting of radiation treatment incidents. This system ensures the granularity of detail required to inform quality improvement and allows for cancer treatment centres to learn from the recommendations and findings reported by others.
- Programmatic quality: CPQR continues to review and update the Quality Assurance Guidelines for Canadian Radiation Treatment Programs to ensure safe, high-quality radiotherapy. Additionally, a continuing partnership with Accreditation Canada ensures that the cancer care standards are updated to reflect guideline changes and vice versa.
- Access to care: Radiotherapy (RT) utilization – the proportion of cancer patients who receive RT – can be considered a key measure of access. Past RTU calculations in several provinces have fallen short of desired benchmarks, suggesting that some cancer patients who would benefit from RT are not receiving it. Following an assessment of RTU in 2016, CPQR continues to review provincial RTU data against established benchmarks and make recommendations for provincial cancer programs to improve access to radiotherapy and support better access to care.
Emerging Needs
Through CPQR, CAPCA is developing a coordinated response to address several areas of emerging need in radiotherapy quality and safety. These include:
- Addressing HR challenges that threaten the ability to deliver high-quality radiotherapy
- Creating new or enhancing existing partnerships to enable long-term impact of CPQR
- Collaborating to advance pan-Canadian radiation treatment data harmonization
- Leveraging technology to refresh radiotherapy self-audit tools and quality standards reporting
- Implementing a pan-Canadian radiotherapy emergency preparedness and cyber security framework
