Brachytherapy overview Overview of brachytherapy resources in Europe: A survey of patterns of care study for brachytherapy in Europe Ferran Guedea a, * , Tracey Ellison b , Jack Venselaar c , Josep Maria Borras a , Peter Hoskin h , Richard Poetter d , Germaine Heeren e , Roselinne Nisin e , Guy Franc ¸ois e , Jean Jacques Mazeron f , Erik Van Limbergen g , Montserrat Ventura a , Michel Taillet e , Brian Cottier b a Institut Catala ` d’Oncologia - IDIBELL, L’Hospitalet del Llobregat; Barcelona, Spain, b The National Cancer Services Analysis Team, NHS, UK, c Dr. B. Verbeeten Instituut, Tilburg, The Netherlands, d Allg. Krankenhaus der Stadt Wien, AKH, Wien, Austria, e ESTRO Office, Brussels, Belgium, f Ho ˆpital Pitie ´-Salpe ˆtrie `re, Paris, France, g University Hospital Gasthuisberg KUL, Leuven, Belgium, h Mont Vernon Hospital, Northwood, UK Abstract Background and purpose: The Patterns of Care for Brachytherapy in Europe (PCBE) study is aimed at establishing a detailed information system on brachytherapy throughout Europe. Materials and methods: The questionnaire was web-based and the analysis used data from each radiotherapy department with brachytherapy. There were three groups: Group I with 19 countries (15 initial European Community (EC) countries plus Iceland, Monaco, Norway and Switzerland -EC+4-), Group II with 10 countries (New European Community countries -NEC-) and Group III with 14 countries (Other European Countries -OEC-). Results: In the European area there are 36 of 43 countries (85%) which achieved data collection from at least 50% of centres, and were included in the analysis. The tumour site that had the largest number of treated patients was gynaecological tumours. Several variations have been found in the mean number of patients treated per consultant radiation oncologist and physicist; and in the proportion of brachytherapy patients with gynaecology, prostate and breast tumours, by country and by European area. The provided data showed that the average number of brachytherapy patients per centre increased by 10% between 1997 and 2002. Conclusions: A European wide evaluation of brachytherapy practice using a web-based questionnaire is feasible and that there is considerable variation in both patterns of practice and available resources.  c 2006 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. Radiotherapy and Oncology 82 (2007) 50–54. Keywords: Brachytherapy; Europe; Patterns of care; Equipment and supplies; Infrastructure Cancer incidence in Western Europe is now about 4000 patients per million per year. Due to the ageing population, a yearly increase of 1–1.5% in cancer cases is to be expected in the next two decades [4,7,13,22]. More than half of cancer patients will receive radiotherapy, and brachytherapy is being increasingly used as treatments become more sophisticated with the spread of pulsed dose rate and high dose rate after- loading machine, and the use of new planning systems. [1,3,5,8,11,12,14,16,19–21,23,24]. The Patterns of Care for Brachytherapy in Europe (PCBE) study was launched to establish an ongoing study to collect detailed information on the brachytherapy pattern of care throughout the European area and to monitor changes with time. With this in mind, continuation of the study in future years will be important to analyse future trends, tendencies and further developments and provide a basis for future pol- icy developments for European brachytherapy. These data were also considered crucial as a feasibility study in the framework of the QUARTS project which aim was to provide health care planners and policy makers with objective estimates of infrastructure and staffing needs for RT [1,3,5,17,19]. This latter form of audit was developed in the framework of the ESTRO ESQUIRE project. Some papers have been published on the radiotherapy equipment and supplies in different countries and regions but only a few have included specific information on the brachytherapy facilities [1–3,5,6,8–10,14,15,18– 21,23,24]. Radiotherapy and Oncology 82 (2007) 50–54 www.thegreenjournal.com 0167-8140/$ - see front matter  c 2006 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.radonc.2006.11.011