The Columbia River Oncology Program (CROP), a community clinical oncology program currently in its twelfth year, is a consortium of three large health care systems in the Portland, Oregon/Vancouver, Washington metropolitan area. These are the Legacy Health System, the Providence Health System and the Southwest Washington Medical Center.
The aims of CROP are to (a) continue to provide and increase clinical cancer research in the community; (b) actively encourage participation of ethnic minority and financially underprivileged groups to participate in cancer treatment, prevention, and control studies; (c) encourage increased participation of non-oncology physicians and the general population in cancer prevention and control studies; and (d) educate both non-oncology physicians and the lay public about cancer treatment, prevention and control. The implementation of the funded application serves to prevent cancer, treat cancer patients at the optimum levels, and to further the knowledge of the cancer disease process in a large metropolitan community, thus meeting the goals of Healthy People 2000. CROP currently affiliates with five research bases: SWOG, NSABP, RTOG, POG, and GOG. All are multi-specialty cooperative groups that supply CROP with NCI approved cancer treatment, prevention, and control protocols that will be utilized over the next five years. The established functioning operational status of CROP includes an Executive Board with representative committee structure, a central office, and actively participating hospital systems. Ninety-five participating physicians and 13 clinical trial nurses are established mature clinical researchers of whom most have been with CROP since its inception. The central office staff handles the administrative aspects of CROP, the large cancer prevention studies, and the quality improvement aspects of cancer treatment and research data collection. Maturation and expertise of the central office computerization of CROP functions, and web site development will facilitate more efficient communication and high quality clinical research. Clinical trial nurses and clinical research associates employed by the consortium hospitals recruit patients to cancer treatment and control protocols, follow these patients for the duration of the study, collect and submit data to the research bases, participate in the quality improvement process, and actively participate in the research base meetings. Each institution employs a pharmacist who manages the investigation drugs for CROP and the pharmacy chair is an active member of the SWOG Pharmacy Committee. CROP investigators and clinical trial nurses actively contribute to the five research base committee activities, including co-authoring scientific papers.
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