This proposal for a European Cancer Patient Digital Centre (ECPDC) Information Portal, EU-CIP, addresses the information needs of cancer patients, survivors, relatives, and caregivers. EU-CIP aims to create a patient-centric cancer information portal that improves health literacy, empowers patients, and reduces inequalities in access to cancer care information across Europe. The EU-CIP primary goal is to improve quality of life and enhance cancer patient care by improving access to general and personalized knowledge, delivering comprehensive information on cancer prevention, early detection, diagnosis, and treatment options including risks, side effects and late effects as well as information on rehabilitation and management of recurrence and palliative care. EU-CIP will prioritise high-incidence cancers, those with poor prognosis, and paediatric cancers. A Common Library of Contents available to all Member States will be created and EU-CIP nodes will be deployed in 10 Member States. The Library of Contents will use information from evidence-based sources such as the Knowledge Centre on Cancer and the European Cancer Information Service, existing Cancer Information Portals, and European guidelines. A governance framework for scalable content creation and review processes supported by AI tooling will be established. The consortium partners, including several patient organisations, will ensure that the patients’ view is reflected in the content review and technology usability aspects. The EU-CIP Central and local nodes will be built in a modular fashion to allow integration with existing electronic health infrastructures. To align with the EU Cancer Mission goal to improve lives through prevention, EU-CIP will raise awareness about the Mission and Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan. Alignment with the Mission’s overall plans will be realized through collaboration with the EU funded projects of the related 01-01/01-02 calls.

BackgroundTraditional urologic surgery involves invasive procedures with lengthy hospitalization and recovery. Since its introduction in the 1980s, minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has caused a paradigm shift in surgery. MIS has been shown to cause less tissue trauma than open surgery and the inflammatory cascade triggered results in fewer adhesions than open surgery. In addition, patients experience reduced postoperative pain and shorter hospitalization. Considering the positive impact of MIS on clinical outcomes and the healthcare system, many surgeons and educators have embraced MIS techniques. However, the way students and surgeons are taught MIS procedures differs greatly between institutions (if even available) due to high costs, and medical disciplines leading to variation in competences and quality. In order to successfully implement MIS and let European patients and the healthcare system fully benefit from all advantages of MIS, a transnational approach is needed to develop a standardized curriculum for a uniform and high-quality transfer of surgical skills.ObjectivesAs such, the objective of this project is to develop a standardized high-quality curriculum for urologic surgery residents and surgeons covering several key MIS procedures (laparoscopy, endoscopic stone treatment and transurethral treatment). The curriculum will be validated, which includes the development of examination and certification criteria, ultimately leading to a standardized, validated and certified curriculum of high-quality. Also, due to the low costs by making use of innovative eLearning techniques, the program can easily be implemented at all universities and hospitals throughout Europe. ParticipantsThe SISE training program will be developed transnationally by 7 different institutions covering 6 different countries. This is because exams and certificates on MIS need to be recognized in Europe, and in order to do this a team made of specialists from different countries toned to be able to compare educational levels in different centers unbiased. The project target groups of the developed curriculum includes urological residents, surgeons and their trainers across Europe.Activities and methodologyTwo educational programs will be developed for three key MIS procedures (endoscopic stone treatment, laparoscopy and transurethral treatment): (1) a train the trainer program to ensure that sufficient number of well-trained trainers are available to teach residents; and (2) a high-quality, standardized program including the required examination and certification for training of residents (to be provided by the trained trainers). The development of these two programs for each of the different MIS types will be performed in parallel since developed methodologies can be adapted for one and another. During SISE, the developed programs will be implemented and validated by all consortium partners. ResultsTraining materials will be developed for both trainers and students. As such, online training material for endoscopic stone treatment courses (ESTs1, ESRs2a, ESTs3), laparoscopy courses (LUSs1/E-BLUS, LUSs2 and LUSs3) and transurethral treatment course (TUT) will become available by the end of this project for both trainers and students. Also, the courses on this will all be validated during the project ensuring that dissemination to other European hospitals and universities of each of the programs can be established after the project. BenefitsFuture implementation of a standardized curriculum will lead to an increase in skilled trainers and residents, and ultimately to better clinical outcomes with less surgical errors, lower readmission and reoperation rates and an associated decrease in healthcare costs. In addition, cross-over to other surgical disciplines is highly probable and feasible since MIS is widely used in other disciplines such as gynecology and cardiology.

Colorectal, breast and cervical cancer cause 155,000 deaths each year in middle income countries (MIC) in Eastern Europe, while there is good evidence that a large proportion could be prevented by organized screening. Although many MIC in Eastern Europe have implemented some form of cancer screening, this screening is often non-organized, leading to lack of data and quality assurance systems. Also, coverage is commonly low and minority groups are not reached. In a previous HORIZON2020 project ‘EU-TOPIA’, we developed road maps to improve cancer screening programmes in Europe. In the current project, EU-TOPIA-EAST, these roadmaps will be refined and translated into action plans for three MICs: Georgia (breast), Romania (cervix) and Montenegro (colorectal). These action plans will take the local health and social system into account by performing detailed barrier and stakeholder analyses, leading to feasible changes to current screening programs. Next, we will implement these action plans: e.g. in Georgia, we will increase coverage of the programme by establishing a new screening unit; in Romania, we will develop new IT infrastructure to allow invitation-based cervical cancer screening; and finally in Montenegro we will establish a new colonoscopy center to increase programme capacity decrease travel time for participants. The implemented programs will be monitored and evaluated using key indicators and sophisticated decision models to predict the long-term and country-wide benefits, harms and cost-effectiveness. During workshops and roundtable discussions for policymakers and screening program coordinators from all countries in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to build capacity and upscale the implementation of these intervention(s) in Equitable, Accessible, and SusTainable (EU-TOPIA-EAST) ways. In this way, the project will improve the prevention and early diagnosis of cancer in real-life settings in Eastern European and Mediterranean countries.

Primary prevention of cancer through behaviour changes in adolescence – a critical period in which many risk behaviours are initiated –, is a huge health and societal challenge in Europe. In alignment with this need, SUNRISE will co-create, implement and evaluate an innovative digitally-enhanced life-skills programme for primary prevention of cancer through sustainable health behaviour change in adolescents, tailored to their socio-economic, cultural and environmental diversities. SUNRISE will combine an established, evidence-based digital solution for smoking prevention, with novel intervention approaches such as peer social media campaigns, advertising literacy training, educational games, and social robot platforms, to take cancer prevention approaches for adolescents in the EU to the next level. The digitally-enhanced programme and its components will be developed through co-creation with schools-as-living-labs methods involving multiple societal actors such as educators, adolescents, parents, public health experts, and policy-makers. The programme will be implemented and evaluated at large scale across 154 schools and 7500 students in urban and rural regions of 8 European countries - Greece, Switzerland, Slovenia, Spain, Cyprus, Italy, Belgium, Romania -, including socially disadvantaged groups such as migrants and ethnic minorities. The effectiveness of both methods for achieving long-term health behaviour change, as well as the implementation strategy for solution adoption and multi-country sustainability, will be evaluated. This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on “Prevention & early detection (behavioural change).

CBIG-SCREEN aims to tackle inequality in cervical cancer screening (CCS) continuum. Though CCS programmes drastically reduce cervical cancer mortality, they remain largely inaccessible and underused by subpopulations of vulnerable women, creating inequality in the European healthcare system. CCS programmes rarely reach the subgroups at highest risk, adding to the challenges underserved populations already face in their efforts to maintain their socioeconomic and physical health. CBIG-SCREEN will create a Europe-wide knowledge framework around barriers to CCS and generate policies, programmes, communications and other required services to meet the needs of underserved sub-populations of women with inherent high-risk of cervical cancer and low (perceived) access to proper healthcare routes. CBIG-SCREEN will be working collaboratively with vulnerable and underserved women to identify the interventions that will more effectively engage and retain them in CCS programmes in European countries. Through stakeholder engagement, mathematical analyses, and structured reviews of current policies, our consortium will collect, analyse, and share knowledge about shortcomings and opportunities for improving CCS continuum that will directly translate to policy recommendations and be used to adapt and extend national CCS with interventions tailored to vulnerable subpopulations. By deploying screening programmes aimed specifically to serve vulnerable women we can thus leverage limited resources to quickly reduce CCS mortality. Our interventions aim to reduce health inequality by increasing screening ratios among vulnerable women from 26% to 45% and intend to offer support to policymakers and national programmes to help Europe reach or exceed the WHO 2030 target of screening >70% of women for cervical cancer. CBIG-SCREEN project will realise the needed improvements in the European screening policies to address the current inequities and thus accelerate cervical cancer elimination.