Research adds to concerns about surgeons performing occasional breast cancer ...( A leading cancer expert has expressed c...),Health

Professor Ian Fentiman from London's Guy's Hospital made his comments in IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice, after researchers from Korea discovered that 95 per cent of breast cancer surgery readmissions were from hospitals performing less than 100 procedures a year.

"The growing volume of evidence that surgical expertise has a significant impact on outcome is becoming increasingly hard to ignore" says Professor Fentiman. "The days of the occasional breast cancer surgeon are coming to an end."

The Korean team looked at the records of 1,351 women in 24 hospitals and found that just over one per cent were readmitted because of complications within 30 days of undergoing surgery.

There was a strong link between the volume of procedures a hospital carried out and the readmission rate. 71 per cent of the women had been treated at hospitals performing less than 50 breast cancer operations a year and a further 24 per cent had been treated at hospitals performing less than 100 procedures a year.

All the patients were registered with the National Cancer Registry in Korea and the number of patients having breast cancer surgery at low, medium and high volume hospitals was 35, 32 and 33 per cent respectively.

"The results of this study confirm that hospital volume has an impact on the outcome of breast cancer operations and implies the need for setting an optimised number of cancer-related surgeries for each hospital as part of an effort to improve patient outcome" says one of the paper's authors, Professor Seok-Jun Yoon from Korea University in Seoul.

Professor Fentiman agrees that there is an increasingly well-documented link between surgical volume and outcome.

In his accompanying editorial to the paper,
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Contact: Annette Whibley
wordwizard@clara.co.uk
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
4-Jan-2006