ESCCA Certifcation Exam also available for non-members
Non-members will be able to take the ESCCA Exam from 1 September 2024. The fee is €250 and includes a free ESCCA membership for 1 year.
For more information about the certifcation and exam, please see the Education section.
ESCCA members benefit from a reduced fee of €100 and can register via the membership section.
31/7/2024
ESCCA Elections
2024 is an election year for the Executive Board and Financial Auditor positions. The election takes place online from 3-24 September 2024. All interested ESCCA members with an active 2024 membership account are invited to submit their candidacy. Please consult the membership section for further information.
11/7/2024
Launch of ESCCA Forum for members
ESCCA is launching a forum intended to support mutual learning for experienced diagnosticians; Haematopathologists, Cytometrists, Haematologists, Immunologists. This is a friendly virtual forum where we take turns to present cases/brief case series that could be educational, challenging, or perhaps an example of something rare. Or an unusual or difficult MRD interpretation, with follow-up letting us know what happened next. While we work in a WHO/ICC diagnostic setting, flow cytometry will play a key role. Perhaps we want to include a brief mention of related papers, if available. We do not expect fully-fledged publishable case reports - a clinical background and a final WHO/ICC diagnosis or clinical conclusion reached, with the data used to reach that, could serve as a guideline. Unless of course a final diagnosis was not quite reached: sometimes it could be that we would like to ask ‘what would you do’ or ‘how would you interpret this’. Sometimes, we may wish to discuss a new interesting paper, and hold the forum as a journal club.
As a general rule, the forum is held on Zoom, on the third Thursday/month at 2pm London, 3pm Paris, 4pm Athens/Cairo. The first forum will be on April 18th. An invitational email has been sent to ESCCA members on 4 April.
EILCP
Inter-Laboratory Comparison Programme (EILCP) is free for all ESCCA members, and offers interesting haemato-oncology cases for us to analyse and then compare our results with the expert laboratory who contributed the files, and with all other EILCP members (it is anonymous of course!) Cases span all our workload, Diagnosis, AML MRD, ALL MRD, T-ALL MRD, CLL MRD, HCL MRD and high resolution PNH. It is a great scheme for both personal trianing and to provide evidence of flow data sharing, assisting us in ISO15189 compliance.
The application form can be downloaded from the EICLP page in the membership section.
New European Union In Vitro Diagnostics Regulations (EU IVDR)
Many of our members have asked questions around working under the planned new EU IVDR. The time-line for these regulations to come into play has changed, creating extended valuable time to prepare for them.
Clinical flow cytometry laboratories provide a multitude of diagnostic and prognostic tests. These may be available commercially or developed in-house (referred to in the EU IVDR as ‘devices manufactured and used only within health institutions’).
We recognise the importance of working together with industry to support development of high quality CE-IVD assays suitable for use in routine laboratories. Additionally, we acknowledge that it is necessary that our laboratories provide in-house assays as part of our service since we work in a constantly evolving field, and thus require the capacity to provide cutting edge service to our users. Application of in-house assays requires robust validation procedures and compliance with ISO-15189:2012 accreditation.
Therefore, ESCCA welcomes working with industry with a view to increasing the availability of commercial IVDR assays for use in routine practice. Also, we aim to work towards supporting individual members and laboratories by providing guidance related to assay validation and ISO 15189 accreditation. To this end, we look forward to working within ESCCA, as well as with our affiliated societies, to aid development of consensus guidelines.