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Article of the Week: Recourse to RP and associated short-term outcomes in Italy

Every Week the Editor-in-Chief selects an Article of the Week from the current issue of BJUI. The abstract is reproduced below and you can click on the button to read the full article, which is freely available to all readers for at least 30 days from the time of this post.

In addition to the article itself, there is an accompanying editorial written by a prominent member of the urological community. This blog is intended to provoke comment and discussion and we invite you to use the comment tools at the bottom of each post to join the conversation.

Finally, the third post under the Article of the Week heading on the homepage will consist of additional material or media. This week we feature a video from Mr. Julian Hanske, discussing his editorial. 

If you only have time to read one article this week, it should be this one.

Recourse to radical prostatectomy and associated short-term outcomes in Italy: a country-wide study over the last decade

Giacomo Novara, Vincenzo Ficarra*, Filiberto Zattoni and Ugo Fedeli

 

Department of Surgery, Oncology, and Gastroenterology, Urology Clinic, University of Padova, Padova, *Department of Experimental and Clinical Medical Sciences, Urologic Clinic, University of Udine, Udine, and †Epidemiological Department, Veneto Region, Italy

 

OBJECTIVE

To estimate time trends in the recourse to radical prostatectomy (RP) and associated short-term outcomes after RP in Italy, as population-based data on RP adoption and outcomes are available mainly from Northern America and Northern Europe.

PATIENTS AND METHODS

All RPs for prostate cancer performed between 2001 and 2010 were extracted from the Italian national archive of hospital discharge records. Age-specific and age-standardised RP rates were computed. The effect of procedural volume on in-hospital mortality, complications, and length of stay (LOS) was estimated by multilevel regression models.

RESULTS

In all, 144 432 RPs were analysed. Country-wide RP rates increased between 2001 and 2004, and thereafter remained stable, with large differences between geographical areas. The mean hospital volume increased in the first study years, without centralisation but due to increasing RP numbers at the population level. The median LOS declined from 10 to 8 days over the study period (mean from 11.7 to 9.2 days). In-hospital mortality declined from 0.16% in 2001 to 0.07% in 2010. In-hospital mortality, LOS, and the prevalence of complications increased with age, and decreased with year of surgery. Compared with very low-volume hospitals, procedures performed in high-volume hospitals were associated with decreased in-hospital mortality, in-hospital complications, and LOS.

CONCLUSIONS

The study adds evidence on rapidly changing trends in RP rates in Italy, on improving in-hospital outcomes, and on their association with procedural volume.

Editorial: How Can We Improve Surgical Outcomes?

How to improve surgical outcomes for all is a long-standing health policy/services research question. There are generally two perspectives to the debate. One reasonable approach would be to regionalise, or centralise, the performance of a procedure, in this case radical prostatectomy (RP), to ‘specialised’ surgeons or institutions. Data from the USA show that regionalisation of prostate cancer care initially occurred in the late 1990s and even further more recently after the introduction of robotic surgery. The improvement of surgical outcomes after RP in the USA has been partially attributed to such phenomena [1]. Conversely, it may be impossible to centralise a common procedure, such as RP, to a small number of hospitals, concerns that were raised in an review on improving surgical care by Hollenbeck et al. [2]. Alternatively, large state or national quality improvement initiatives, with incremental advances in process-of-care adoption/compliance, may improve the care of prostate cancer for all. This collaborative and inclusive approach is, for example, employed by the Michigan Urological Surgery Improvement Collaborative (MUSIC). However, one has to factor in that this type of approach demands funding, collaboration and patience. Regardless, there is little doubt that both approaches, enforced by health policy or not, are needed in large and diverse countries such as the USA.

In this issue of BJU International, Novara et al. [3] examine the trends in RP utilisation within Italy. The authors have to be commended for their efforts to raise awareness of the need for concerted cancer registries and centralised treatments. They corroborated previous studies on the relationship between hospital volume and perioperative outcomes, such as in-hospital mortality, complications and length of stay [4]. They also found an improvement in perioperative outcomes over time. Although their study design may only allow us to speculate on the reasons for these improvements, they are likely to be the result of many factors, such as improved surgical technique, improved perioperative medical/anaesthetic care and regionalisation of care. For surgical technique, the only significant advance over the past decade was the introduction of robot-assisted RP. Given the late adoption of robotic surgery in Italy and the controversy about its benefits, this is unlikely to be the major driver behind the recorded trends. On perioperative medical/anaesthetic care, the past decade has seen major advances and standardisation of thromboembolic prevention, perioperative care of patients with pre-existing heart conditions and significant comorbidities. Finally, centralisation of care may have played an important role in the decreasing rates of adverse outcomes after RP. Although the authors specify that there was no policy-driven regionalisation of RP care in Italy (relative to the UK, for example), the increase in average hospital volume should translate into better outcomes, as discussed above [4]. Further regionalisation should be expected in Italy with the adoption of robotic surgery, as only a few centres have the means and logistics to support a da Vinci system [5].

Julian Hanske *, Christian P. Meyer†‡ and Quoc-Dien Trinh

 

*Department of Urology, Marien Hospital, Ruhr-University Bochum, Herne, Germany, Division of Urologic Surgery and Center for Surgery and Public Health, Brigham and WomenHospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA and Department of Urology, University Medical Centre HamburgEppendorf, Hamburg, Germany

 

References

 

 

2 Hollenbeck BK, Miller DC, Wei JT, Montie JE. Regionalization of care:centralizing complex surgical procedures. Nat Clin Pract Urol 2005; 2: 461

 

 

4 Trinh QD, Bjartell A, Freedland SJ et al. A systematic review of the volumeoutcome relationship for radical prostatectomy. Eur Urol 2013; 64: 78698

 

5 Makarov DV, Yu JB, Desai RA, Penson DF, Gross CP. The association between diffusion of the surgical robot and radical prostatectomy rates. Med Care 2011; 49: 3339

 

Video: How Can We Improve Surgical Outcomes?

Recourse to radical prostatectomy and associated short-term outcomes in Italy: a country-wide study over the last decade

Giacomo Novara, Vincenzo Ficarra*, Filiberto Zattoni and Ugo Fedeli

 

Department of Surgery, Oncology, and Gastroenterology, Urology Clinic, University of Padova, Padova, *Department of Experimental and Clinical Medical Sciences, Urologic Clinic, University of Udine, Udine, and †Epidemiological Department, Veneto Region, Italy

 

OBJECTIVE

To estimate time trends in the recourse to radical prostatectomy (RP) and associated short-term outcomes after RP in Italy, as population-based data on RP adoption and outcomes are available mainly from Northern America and Northern Europe.

PATIENTS AND METHODS

All RPs for prostate cancer performed between 2001 and 2010 were extracted from the Italian national archive of hospital discharge records. Age-specific and age-standardised RP rates were computed. The effect of procedural volume on in-hospital mortality, complications, and length of stay (LOS) was estimated by multilevel regression models.

RESULTS

In all, 144 432 RPs were analysed. Country-wide RP rates increased between 2001 and 2004, and thereafter remained stable, with large differences between geographical areas. The mean hospital volume increased in the first study years, without centralisation but due to increasing RP numbers at the population level. The median LOS declined from 10 to 8 days over the study period (mean from 11.7 to 9.2 days). In-hospital mortality declined from 0.16% in 2001 to 0.07% in 2010. In-hospital mortality, LOS, and the prevalence of complications increased with age, and decreased with year of surgery. Compared with very low-volume hospitals, procedures performed in high-volume hospitals were associated with decreased in-hospital mortality, in-hospital complications, and LOS.

CONCLUSIONS

The study adds evidence on rapidly changing trends in RP rates in Italy, on improving in-hospital outcomes, and on their association with procedural volume.

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