Rapid review
Patient volume and quality of care for liver cancer surgery
Report
|Updated
Rapid review of studies that assessed hospital or surgeon volume and outcomes after surgery of primary or metastatic liver tumours. Search for literature period January 2006 to August 2008.
Key message
The hospital provider for the south east region in Norway asked the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the health services to update our previous systematic review on patient volume and quality of care to assess new publications for resection of liver tumours.
We searched for publications in Medline for the period January 2006 to August 2008 that extends our previous search to cover the period back to 1990. We included studies that assessed hospital or surgeon volume and outcomes after surgery of primary or metastatic liver tumours.
We identified 10 studies, of which 2 were included from the previous report. The studies were from the US and Canada.
The results from these studies showed:
- Better survival and lower in-hospital mortality for patients treated in high
volume hospitals. - The volume thresholds defining high volume varied from 10 to 30 annual
procedures.
Most studies were old and covered treatment given before year 2000. Furthermore there are some overlapping studies due to multiple publications from the same databases.
The volume of liver cancer surgeries has increased in Norway, both for primary liver cancer and metastatic surgery.
Nine hospitals were registered with liver cancer procedures in 2007; median annual volume was 9 for primary liver cancer and 8 for metastatic surgery.