This website was built by the South Australian Prostate Cancer Clinical Outcomes Collaborative (SA-PCOCC).  The collaborative was established in 1998 as an ongoing venture of Flinders University, Repatriation General Hospital, Royal Adelaide (RAH), The Queen Elizabeth (TQEH), the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia. The flagship of this collaborative is a database tracking men with prostate cancer in South Australia.

The database follows men with prostate cancer treated at the major metropolitan hospitals: the Royal Adelaide Hospital, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Flinders Medical Centre/Repatriation General Hospital, Noarlunga Hospital, Lyell McEwin and collaborating private institutions and clinicians.

As part of a bi-national collaboration, SA-PCCOC are also contributors to the Prostate Cancer Outcomes Registry –Australia and New Zealand (PCOR-ANZ) which is funded from the Movember Foundation.

History and Evolution

The database was established with NHMRC funding under the Centre of Clinical Excellence Program by Dr Alan Stapleton and colleagues. Initially collecting data from Repatriation General Hospital (RGH) and Flinders Medical Centre, it soon expanded to cover men diagnosed and treated at the three major public teaching hospitals treating prostate cancer – Royal Adelaide hospital, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Flinders Medical Centre/RGH.

The introduction of robot-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy at the Royal Adelaide available to public as well as private patients boosted the number of patients undergoing radical prostatectomy within the database in 2004 and after, and this was further expanded with commencement of recruiting from two high volume private practices in 2008.

The collection has expanded from 3,500 in 2008 to over 11,000 at the end of 2016, accruing at approximately 1,200 new patients per year.

Governance of the data collection was addressed in 2010 with the establishment of a steering committee comprising Urologists representing each of the major collecting centres, radiation oncology, nursing, consumers and the Cancer Council South Australia. This committee has overseen expansion of the database and establishment of a research committee directing and supporting the research program.

 

 

Aims and Objectives

The SA-PCCOC is a multi-centre, multidisciplinary collaboration between men diagnosed with prostate cancer, clinicians involved in the treatment of prostate cancer and researchers.  It is held in high regard by both national and international researchers as a repository of high quality data.

 

Our focus is on collecting quality of data. We are committed to maintaining a comprehensive data collection of men diagnosed with prostate cancer and utilising evidence-based tools for assessing outcomes of treatment.

 
Our objectives are as follows:

 

  • To undertake clinical outcomes research in order to better understand progression of prostate cancer and ways of facilitating clinical decision-making;
  • To provide data to contributors relating to their clinical practice for audit and feedback purposes;
  • To facilitate clinical prostate cancer research for post-graduate students, surgical trainees, clinicians and researchers;
  • To collaborate closely with other prostate cancer registries in Australia;
  • To seek collaboration with other institutions and databases to validate the quality of data collection and contribute to multi-institutional research.