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Quality Assessment in Surgery: Mission Impossible?

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Patient Safety in Surgery

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Abstract

Patients, health care providers, and payers in many countries demand a comprehensive assessment of quality in surgery. By collecting, reporting and comparing surgical outcome, deficiencies in surgical care may be unveiled and corrected to improve safety and quality in surgery. Reliable data collection is also important to compare the outcome of different treatments and for benchmarking. However, any evaluation of surgical quality remains elusive, unless there is a common methodology for reporting negative outcomes and a consensus on what good quality should be. Quality can be viewed from different angles—the definition of quality may widely differ between patients, the society, administrators, and health care policy makers. Yet, the incidence of postoperative complications is still the most frequently used surrogate marker of surgical quality but the definition of a surgical complication still lacks standardization, hampering the interpretation of surgical performance. The Clavien-Dindo classification introduced in 2004 provides a validated, easy-to-use, treatment-based classification of surgical complications that has gained wide acceptance in the surgical community. It enables an objective and standardized assessment of surgical performance—a prerequisite to improve the quality of surgical care provided to our patients.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Visceral, Thoracic and Vascular Surgery, Zurich City Hospital Triemli, Birmensdorferstr. 497, Zurich, 8063, Switzerland

    Daniel Dindo MD

  2. Department of Visceral and Transplant Surgery, UniversitätsSpital Zürich, Rämistr. 100, Zurich, 8091, Switzerland

    Pierre-Alain Clavien

Authors
  1. Daniel Dindo MD
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  2. Pierre-Alain Clavien
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniel Dindo MD .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Orthopaedics, Denver Health Medical Center, Denver, Colorado, USA

    Philip F. Stahel

  2. Department of Orthopaedics, Denver Health Medical Center, Denver, Colorado, USA

    Cyril Mauffrey

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© 2014 Springer-Verlag London

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Dindo, D., Clavien, PA. (2014). Quality Assessment in Surgery: Mission Impossible?. In: Stahel, P., Mauffrey, C. (eds) Patient Safety in Surgery. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4369-7_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4369-7_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-4368-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-4369-7

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