While not specific to Prostrate Cancer, as it refers to surviving surgery for cancers in general, the following might be interesting.
The Dutch newspaper AD (Algemene Dagbblad) reported this week that the University Medical Centre in the Dutch city of Utrecht published the results of a study this week that concludes that it appears to saves lives if you concentrate surgical expertise in a limited number of hospitals.
The news report is here, but it’s in Dutch so I’ll try and explain the key points:
www.ad.nl/ad/nl/4560/Gezond/article/detail/3386094/2013/01/31/Specialisme-ziekenhuis-redt-levens.dhtmlThey combined data for assorted operations from assorted hospitals, and the quoted example refers to Pancreatic cancer, but concludes that the improvement is also true for other operations.
In 2004 there were 48 hospitals in the Netherlands that operated on people with pancreatic cancer, but in 2011 there were only 24. The number of patients dying as a result of surgery over that period halved, resulting in about
300 fewer deaths, especially among older patients.
It also points out that hospitals are keen to improve and have been
open to public scrutiny since 2005, so that performance tables get published, such as the AD newspaper’s own “Top 100 Hospitals” and no hospital wants to find itself getting listed as a poor performer.
For the record the hospital I was treated in does not feature in the paper’s Top 100 list at present. It is a specialist cancer hospital, and as it only treats cancer it is hard to compare its performance with hospitals that do just about
everything (I once got a shock when I saw it ranked very low in one performance lists until I spotted that it had scored zero in Maternity, ER, Geriatrics to name a few areas it is not involved with.)
So maybe we don’t just need to recommend guys check how many operations the surgeon has done but also the hospital, as surviving surgery is often about
the whole deal and not just those few hours when you are on the operating table.
Alf