This open website was originally developed with Leonardo funding in the 2005-07 call through a partnership with Imperial College London as Lead, the Italian, Swedish, Polish and Hungarian Cytology Societies and Inbrook Ltd.
Its use has significantly exceeded expectations. It is now the most used cytology e-learning training platform on the web, not only in Europe but also worldwide. The platform is interactive, available in 6 languages (English, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Polish and Hungarian) with Czech, Turkish, German, Rumanian, Portuguese and French being currently implemented or planned. In 2014 it received on average 57,000 visits/month and 60,000 downloaded pages/ month.
New courses are being developed on colposcopy, molecular testing, immunocytochemistry, etc. and self assessment tests will be available. Digitally scanned slides will be added as teaching cases for each topic. More EU countries wish to become involved, with their own training priorities and curricula and the whole training platform will be expanded to reflect their particular professional and competence requirements. The architecture of the website is now dynamic rather than static, allowing easier update and inteactivity.
EFCS, our European Federation, is looking to the website to provide the platform for a European recognised accredited professional training programme; particularly as the European Union of Medical Specialists (UEMS) Oct 2012 ratified that sector training must follow an approved curriculum with individual nations regularly assessed and national variations approved.
The new partners are the EFCS, the Czech and Turkish Cytology Societies, Inbrook Ltd and Interfase Srl, our IT developer. The Editorial Board includes all the current and previous partners
EACC has been subcontracted by EFCS to assess the current format of the website (
www.eurocytology.eu) in order to provide an external validation of the platform and useful data on what to change and implement, also in a national perspective.