Tuula Rintala
Director, Quality of Care and Advocacy
EBMT, European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation
Barcelona, Spain
In 2024, JACIE continued to work towards its goal – to harmonise and continually improve quality control standards in cellular therapy in Europe and beyond. In this, JACIE has continued to make strides in increasing its reach and activity with a record number of inspections carried out in 2024. This is thanks to the nearly 300 inspectors and the committee members, who have given their time generously to the benefit of the Cellular Therapy community.
JACIE continued to perform strongly by our clearest metrics. There were 99 applications in 2024, with 11% of the centres applying for initial accreditation and 9% applying for their 4th re-accreditation. Although JACIE remains firmly embedded in the European Cellular Therapy community, there is increasing interest in JACIE outside Europe although these applications currently account for less than 10% of the applications.
JACIE carried out 91 inspections in 2024, which is the highest number of inspections in the history of JACIE (2023: 77 inspections). This is only possible thanks to the commitment of our inspectors; many of whom have carried out two or even three inspections in the course of the year. The Centres inspected are also increasingly larger and more complex requiring not only more inspectors; more complex logistics for these multi-site Centres, but also focus and precision by our inspectors to capture all the elements in their reports.
Finally, there was a slight increase in the number of centres accredited in 2024 with 72 Centres completing the process in 2024. This reflects the collaborative efforts of the Accreditation Committee, which continued to meet fortnightly to review all the inspection reports, and the applicants responding in a timely manner to deficiencies identified during the inspections.
Institutions accredited in 2024 are available on the EBMT website:
https://www.ebmt.org/ebmt/news/72-centres-achieved-jacie-accreditation-2024
None of this activity would be possible without our committed inspectors who in addition to inspection activity also give their time in the different committees. There were three Inspector Training Courses in 2024 in Barcelona, Cambridge and Stockholm with a total of 59 new inspectors trained. The training days are always highlights in the JACIE calendar and we would like to thank BSBMTCT JACIE Committee and the Nordic Transplant Group for their support for these training events.
The New Year brings always new opportunities and challenges. We will commence our training activities in a February in Rome, Italy; following with another course in Bern, Switzerland in March 2025. Work will also continue with our in FACT colleagues on the development of the 9th edition of HCT Standards and 3rd edition of IEC Standards due to be published later this year.
Finally, we will continue to develop new resources for our Centres and Inspectors in support of the continuous quality improvement at the heart of everything we do.
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