The effect of surgery report cards on improving radical prostatectomy quality: the SuRep study protocol

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Abstract

Background

The goal of radical prostatectomy is to achieve the optimal balance between complete cancer removal and preserving a patient’s urinary and sexual function. Performing a wider excision of peri-prostatic tissue helps achieve negative surgical margins, but can compromise urinary and sexual function. Alternatively, sparing peri-prostatic tissue to maintain functional outcomes may result in an increased risk of cancer recurrence. The objective of this study is to determine the effect of providing surgeons with detailed information about their patient outcomes through a surgical report card.

Methods

We propose a prospective cohort quasi-experimental study. The intervention is the provision of feedback to prostate cancer surgeons via surgical report cards. These report cards will be distributed every 3 months by email and will present surgeons with detailed information, including urinary function, erectile function, and surgical margin outcomes of their patients compared to patients treated by other de-identified surgeons in the study. For the first 12 months of the study, pre-operative, 6-month, and 12-month patient data will be collected but there will be no report cards distributed to surgeons. This will form the pre-feedback cohort. After the pre-feedback cohort has completed accrual, surgeons will receive quarterly report cards. Patients treated after the provision of report cards will comprise the post-feedback cohort. The primary comparison will be post-operative function of the pre-feedback cohort vs. post-feedback cohort. The secondary comparison will be the proportion of patients with positive surgical margins in the two cohorts. Outcomes will be stratified or case-mix adjusted, as appropriate. Assuming a baseline potency of 20% and a baseline continence of 70%, 292 patients will be required for 80% power at an alpha of 5% to detect a 10% improvement in functional outcomes. Assuming 30% of patients may be lost to follow-up, a minimum sample size of 210 patients is required in the pre-feedback cohort and 210 patients in the post-feedback cohort.

Discussion

The findings from this study will have an immediate impact on surgeon self-evaluation and we hypothesize surgical report cards will result in improved overall outcomes of men treated with radical prostatectomy.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (10.1186/s12894-018-0403-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Most cited references 28

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Author and article information

Contributors

R. M. Kumar:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0191-216X

rkuma015@uottawa.ca

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): BMC Urol

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): BMC Urol

Title: BMC Urology

Publisher: BioMed Central (London )

ISSN (Electronic): 1471-2490

Publication date (Electronic): 19 October 2018

Publication date PMC-release: 19 October 2018

Publication date Collection: 2018

Volume: 18

Electronic Location Identifier: 89

Affiliations

[1 ]Division of Urology, Department of Surgery, The Ottawa Hospital, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON Canada

[2 ]ISNI 0000 0000 9606 5108, GRID grid.412687.e, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, ; Ottawa, ON Canada

[3 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2182 2255, GRID grid.28046.38, Faculty of Health Sciences, , University of Ottawa, ; Ottawa, ON Canada

[4 ]ISNI 0000 0000 9606 5108, GRID grid.412687.e, The Ottawa Hospital Cancer Program, ; Ottawa, Canada

Author information

R. M. Kumar http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0191-216X

Article

Publisher ID: 403

DOI: 10.1186/s12894-018-0403-y

PMC ID: 6194548

PubMed ID: 30340572

SO-VID: 5b58d740-e22b-4180-a410-a59ab555156b

License:

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

History

Date received : 29 March 2018

Date accepted : 5 October 2018

Funding

Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000109, Prostate Cancer Canada;

Award ID: Discovery 2014 D2014-2

Custom metadata

ScienceOpen disciplines: Urology

Keywords: prostate cancer,radical prostatectomy,surgeon feedback,surgical report cards,audit and feedback,knowledge translation

Data availability:

ScienceOpen disciplines: Urology

Keywords: prostate cancer, radical prostatectomy, surgeon feedback, surgical report cards, audit and feedback, knowledge translation

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Single institution followed by national implementation of systematic surgical quality control and feedback for radical prostatectomy: a 20-year journey
Authors: J Stranne, E Axen, I. Franck-Lissbrant …

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