At www.Inspire2Go.nl you find the website Treatment Centres of Excellence. This site started more than a year ago. Its purpose is to directly provide patients with information they can use in their selection of the centre where they want to be treated.

The information is the result of an opinion poll among a large number of cancer specialists. The central question is: In your opinion, which centres are the Top-3 within your own field of expertise?

The poll was conducted by IQVIA, a large medical company specialised in medical data gathering and analysis, and also a company that happens to be a friend of Inspire2Live (they provided this quite laborious and complex result free of charge!). The results were checked for reliability by Professor Bert Kersten, mathematician, specialised in the interpretation of such poll results. In most cases the result is a list of just three or four centres that were preferred by the ‘majority’ of the experts in the field.

The Corona virus led to major disruption in the workload of hospitals in early 2020, which caused IQVIA to temporarily suspend the inquiry. Only at the end of 2020 was it possible to resume the inquiry, this time directed at urologists. Now prostate cancer has been added to the website, with a few more types coming soon after.

Prostate cancer is a highly complex cancer, and there is considerable movement both in the treatment methods and in the different cooperation’s and specialisations of the treatment centres. Fortunately the Prostate Cancer Foundation of the Netherlands is a very knowledgeable, active and supportive club of patients. They have advised us on our information page and they will certainly support any patient who calls for extra information or suggestions.

Addition of patient stories to the website

Recently a few patients have approached Inspire2Live and Inspire2Go for support in deciding which treatment centre to go to. Their very personal and emotional stories are documented on a new page called Your Stories. This page is currently only available in Dutch. Translation in English will follow soon.

Tielo Jongmans
Patient Advocate Inspire2Live