The Columbia River Oncology Program (CROP), a Community Clinical Oncology Program (CCOP) currently in its seventeenth year, is a consortium of three health care systems in the metropolitan Portland, Oregon/Vancouver, Washington area. These health care systems encompass: Legacy Health System, Providence Health System, and Southwest Washington Medical Center. The CROP specific aims are: 1) enhance the health of our community by providing and promoting cancer treatment, cancer prevention and cancer control research studies, 2) seek opportunities to mirror the diversity of our community by providing complementary and holistic clinical research studies, 3) advocate for and participate in clinical trials providing symptom management, improved quality of life, and palliative care for our cancer patient population, 4) establish an enriched environment that encourages oncology and non-oncology community physicians to participate in clinical research trials creating a broader Investigator base and increasing our accrual goals, and 5) expand participation of minorities, women and the underserved population to participate in cancer prevention, cancer control and treatment studies. The implementation of the funded application serves to prevent, control and treat cancer patients with state of the art studies, advancing the knowledge of cancer and improving the health of our community thus meeting the goals of Healthy People 2010. CROP currently affiliates with five research bases: SWOG, NSABP, RTOG, COG, and GOG. All are multi-specialty cooperative groups that supply CROP with NCI approved cancer prevention control and treatment 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. 118 participating physicians, 20 Clinical Trial Nurses (CTN) and 15 Clinical Research Associates (CRA) participate in our CCOP. The Central Office Staff coordinates the administrative aspects of CROP, the large cancer prevention studies and the quality improvement aspects of cancer treatment. CTN and CRA employed by the consortium hospitals recruit patients to cancer control and treatment protocols, collect and submit data to the research bases, participate in the quality improvement process, and actively participate in the research base meetings. Each organization employs a pharmacist to manage the investigation agents for CROP.
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