The ESGO Accreditation in Advanced Ovarian Cancer Surgery recognises institutions that deliver high-quality surgical care for patients with advanced ovarian cancer, in line with established European standards.
The accreditation is based on ESGO quality indicators and a validated scoring system developed with an international expert panel. It evaluates surgical performance, organisation of care, and clinical outcomes.
Eligibility
To get accredited, centres must:
- Meet the criteria defined in the ESGO quality indicators for advanced ovarian cancer surgery.
- Perform a minimum of 24 complete cytoreductive surgeries for advanced epithelial ovarian cancer per year and minimum of 12 complete primary cytoreductive surgeries per year (secondary and tertiary surgeries for recurrences are not included). Note that diagnostic and palliative surgery, recurrences, borderline tumours, non-epithelial tumours, and stage I-II epithelial ovarian cancer are not considered.
- Achieve a score of 32+ points via the self-assessment to prove satisfactory surgical management of advanced ovarian cancers (see details in ).
ESGO may perform random audits of applicants by asking for operative reports and pathology reports from selected cases in their dataset.
Application process
Applications are submitted online via REDCap.
After creating an account you will be guided through the submission process, including data entry and validation.
Information required
- A pseudo-anonymised dataset containing all referred cases of advanced ovarian cancer, including surgical and non-surgical cases in the last 3 calendar years.
- Documentation of clinical trials (NCT number and recruitment numbers overall per year, if available).
- A description of how complications are documented, and quality management is performed.
- A list of articles published on ovarian cancer by team members from your centre (for eligibility to be a Centre of Excellence).
REDCap will ask for data from the past 3 years.
Questions?
Questions? If you have any questions, you can email us at adminoffice@www.esgo.org
Application review
- After initial reviews, the application is submitted to a jury (3 members, rotating every 2 years) outside the country of the applicant institution.
- The review and evaluation will be processed via the REDCap platform.
- Accreditation is valid for 5 years, subject to renewal if standards are maintained. Reminders for reaccreditation will be automatically sent from REDCap.
- If rejected, centres can resubmit an application after 1 year.
Centres of Excellence
High-volume and high-quality centres will be automatically assessed to be a ‘Centre of Excellence’ in their accreditation type.
To qualify centres must:
- Perform ≥ 50 stage III-IV cytoreductive complete surgeries per year.
- Actively participate in at least one clinical trial in ovarian cancer.
- Publish at least 3 articles on ovarian cancer per year authored by a gynaecological surgical oncology member of the team during the last 3 years, including at least one article as first or last author.
- Optionally, having a basic research program and a biobank facility.
Centres of Excellence contribute to ESGO’s quality assurance programme by supporting education to improve care in non-accredited centres and by complementing training for lower-volume accredited centres.