Background
Clinical audits are an important tool to objectively assess clinical protocols, procedures, and processes and to detect deviations from good clinical practice. The main aim of this project is to determine adherence to a core set of consensus- based quality indicators and then to compare the institutions in order to identify best practices.
Materials and methods
We conduct a multicentre, international clinical audit of six comprehensive cancer centres in Poland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, and Romania as a part of the project, known as IROCATES (Improving Quality in Radiation Oncology through Clinical Audits — Training and Education for Standardization).
Results
Radiotherapy practice varies from country to country, in part due to historical, economic, linguistic, and cultural differences. The institutions developed their own processes to suit their existing clinical practice.
Conclusions
We believe that this study will contribute to establishing the value of routinely performing multi-institutional clinical audits and will lead to improvement of radiotherapy practice at the participating centres.