Naval Medical Center Portsmouth is committed to ensuring unparalleled patient care.

This is evidenced by the NMCP's Pediatric Oncology department maintaining the highest standards set forth through its membership with the Children's Oncology Group (COG), and maintaining excellent COG audit results since 2013.

The COG is a National Cancer Institute-supported clinical trials group and also the world's largest organization devoted exclusively to childhood and adolescent cancer research. Through the COG, more than 9,000 experts in childhood cancer at more than 200 leading children's hospitals, universities, and cancer centers from around the world are united with a common goal.

"Participation is not mandatory. You do not have to be a COG center, it's just that we in the military and we here at NMCP, feel that our standard of care needs to meet the highest national standard of care," said Maj. Bethany Mikles, principal investigator for COG.

Ultimately, the goal of the COG is to cure all children and adolescents of cancer, reduce the short- and long-term complications of cancer treatments, and determine the causes which help find ways to prevent childhood cancer. NMCP's Pediatric Oncology department has the same goal which makes participation with the COG essential.

One of the methods that the COG uses to ensure that they are continuously progressing towards its goals is a vigorous audit on member hospitals and institutions providing this type of care.

"The COG has to ensure that all the pediatric cancer institutions around the country are doing good practice of medicine and research so they periodically check in on all," Mikles said. "So if a center has an acceptable audit, it will be audited once every three years. If there are concerns, the COG pushes that up to every one-and-a-half to two years."

Out of all the centers audited over the last three years, the NMCP's Pediatric Oncology department received a perfect audit.

"Several institutions were audited between 2013 and 2015. Our research nurses were looking over the audit data and there were only three centers out of hundreds who had a perfect score - and NMCP was one of them," Mikles added.

On March 24, the COG performed its NMCP audit as scheduled, and the Pediatric Oncology department received a near-perfect audit. "A few of the things that we were looking for during the 2016 audit was compliance, clinical research practice, and correct data," said Rose Duna, a COG auditor.

At the out briefing, COG auditors were very complimentary of the department's documentation. The team stated that the NMCP review was one of the cleanest audits they have seen with very well-organized labeling of everything. This made it easy to find things when requested by the audit team.

"We got a report of one very minor infraction that had to be addressed. It was simply putting a page number on a medication sheet," said Mikles.

With a perfect audit three years ago and a nearly perfect audit this year, NMCP's Pediatric Oncology department continues to prove why NMCP doctors and staff are trailblazers within military medicine and the medical field as a whole.

Today, more than 90 percent of 14,000 children and adolescents diagnosed with cancer each year in the United States are cared for at COG-member institutions, and NMCP is one of them.

For more news from Naval Medical Center Portsmouth, visit www.navy.mil/.