Building on nearly 20 years of experience as a model community oncology program,the Grand Rapids Clinical Oncology Program (GRCOP) seeks the opportunity to continue to meet our community's need for innovative and relevant studies of promising therapeutic modalities and cancer control research through the Year 2000. The GRCOP is a regional clinical trials program: a consortium of 8 hospitals within a 29 county service area in Western Michigan. Six components and two affiliates bring together investigators from 5 cities: Grand Rapids, Holland, Battle Creek, Big Rapids, and Traverse city. The service area represents metropolitan and rural populations of over 1.8 million people, or 19.8% of the state's population. The GRCOP provides the only access to clinical trials to several rural counties with low population density. The goal of the Grand Rapids Clinical Oncology Program is to contribute to scientific knowledge and to enhance the level of care in the community through participation in NCI sponsored clinical treatment and cancer control trials. Several aims describe the long-term objectives: to mobilize the existing GRCOP service area resources to increase accrual on NCI protocol studies, including minorities, women, and underserved populations; to provide our Grand Rapids CCOP participants an important opportunity to contribute to national research goals by providing access to the full range of available protocols by our continued work with our CCOP Research Bases, SWOG, CCG, NSABP, and MDACC; to expand our longstanding commitment to cancer prevention and control research, exceeding our past record and retaining adherent participants for the duration of the BCPT & PCPT; and to promote the involvement of primary care providers and other specialists in cancer prevention and control clinical trials. The GRCOP will assist the Public Health Service in achieving the health promotion and disease prevention objectives of Healthy People 2000 as it relates to the health status objectives of cancer and will assist the NCI in its periodic, programmatic evaluation projects. The methods used to achieve these goals include an extensive GRCOP network, a solid organizational base, and an-outstanding data management program. Our GRCOP network incorporates strong links among the medical oncologists (25), multidisciplinary contributors (45), primary care collaborators (170), hospital components and affiliates (8) and consumer representatives within a tightly woven series of community healthcare programs and resources. This network is supported by a solid organizational structure, both adult and pediatric components, a proven and comprehensive data management system for the timely collection and transmission of data to our four research bases with ongoing clinical research Quality Control programs, assuring the highest possible data quality to our research bases for use in analyses and publications. The GRCOP expects to accumulate 330 credits per year in the next funding period, with 121 treatment credits and 209 cancer control credits. The GRCOP will continuously build on prior successes described in the cancer control history and the cancer control illustrations to sustain our innovative cancer control and prevention research programs.
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