Late 2018 or early 2019, the Commission will publish the official Call for expression of interest for the piloting of the European Breast QA scheme which will gather all 35 ECIBC participating countries with their breast cancer services (BCSs) and the conformity assessment and accreditation bodies which will audit the participating BCSs.
Approximately 15 BCSs will be then shortlisted to pilot the scheme while ensuring that all the critical factors are covered (e.g. care process, volume of service users, healthcare expenditure ratio over the gross domestic product (GDP), relevant healthcare organizational settings, etc.). In this way, the piloting will serve as a stress test in different contexts, allowing the ECIBC to evaluate if adjustments to the scheme would be necessary before its release within the accreditation legal framework.
Since 2014, EA has been actively contributing to the ECIBC (European Commission Initiative on Breast Cancer) through an EA working group led by Franco Gattafoni from ACCREDIA, the Italian national accreditation body (NAB), to provide an accreditation legal framework to the project and ensure the coordination of the national accreditation bodies.