European School of Oncology

The first ESO oncology course was held in 1982 in the Castello di Pomerio in Lombardy northern Italy, near Milan.[4][5] The teaching faculty comprised most of the School’s founders, and the course covered the principles of management of the main cancers from a multidisciplinary standpoint. In its early years the School concentrated on post-graduate courses in medical oncology, which at that time was treated in most of Europe as a branch of internal medicine, rather than a specialism requiring its own curriculum and qualifications.[12] From 2001, the School began to focus much of its work on countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans region, where survival rates for cancer were markedly lower than in Western Europe and Northern Europe.[2][13] It also started to widen its areas of work to support oncologists at different stages in their careers, starting from the time they leave medical school. In 2002 ESO ran the first five-day Masterclass in Clinical Oncology.[14][15] In 2004 it initiated a summertime Oncology for Medical Students course.[16][17] In 2008 the e-ESO distance learning programme was started, to increase global access to oncology education.[18] In 2012 ESO launched a visiting professors programme, primarily to support clinical institutes in Eastern Europe and the Balkan Region.[2] In 2013 it added a scheme for clinical training fellowships at centres of excellence across Europe,[19] and also set up certificates of competence as specialist qualifications in lymphoma,[20] breast cancer,[21] and gastrointestinal cancer,[22] and a certificate of advanced studies in lung cancer,[23] which run in collaboration with the University of Ulm, the University of Zurich and the Università della Svizzera italiana. In 2020 the School set up the ESO college ESCO,[24] to bring all these different initiatives into a structure that alumni can pursue step by step.