The joint effort with the ICCR and AJCC to fight cancer
It is well-known that pathology reports offer essential information required for the treatment of all types of cancers. The International Collaboration on Cancer Reporting (ICCR) was founded by major pathology organisations from around the world to produce internationally standardised and evidence based datasets for the pathology reporting of cancer. Specifically IAP, together with many other societies, represents one of the affiliated organization. The goal is to advance international benchmarking in cancer management and to improve cancer patient outcomes worldwide . One of the major and strong support is the translation of ICCR datasets into numerous languages. This aspect is strongly helpful to facilitate the implementation of standardised cancer reporting worldwide.
In particular, ICCR is focused on bridging equity access to support pathologists practicing in Low- and Middle-income Countries (LMICs) to effectively communicate complete cancer pathology results to associated clinicians, cancer registrars and other secondary users, thus ultimately benefiting cancer patients globally.
What’s about its historical creation?
The idea of an international collaborative body to standardize cancer pathology reports worldwide was originally conceived by David Ellis and John Srigley following meetings in Sydney and Banff in 2009. With strong support from the founding project manager, Meagan Judge and the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia (RCPA), the team engaged with pathology colleagues in the United Kingdom (RCPath),USA (USCAP) and Canada [the Canadian Association of Pathologists (CAP-ACP) and the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer (CPAC)], leading to formation of the International Collaboration of Cancer Reporting (ICCR) in 2011.
ICCR objective is to reduce the global burden of cancer dataset development and reduplication of effort by the different international institutions that commission, publish and maintain standardized cancer reporting datasets. ICCR recognised that such a coordinated effort on cancer reporting would offer synergies and have far–reaching benefits for oncologists worldwide, especially for those practicing in countries with limited resources to develop their own datasets.