(Italy)Clinical governance network for clinical audit to improve quality in epithelial ovarian cancer management

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Background
Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is the most lethal gynecological cancer. Worldwide, there are 224,747 new cases yearly and an estimated 140,163 disease-related deaths [1]. In Europe, approximately 66,700 new ovarian cancer cases are diagnosed yearly, with the highest incidence in the Northern European countries and the United Kingdom [2,3]. The lifetime risk varies from 1.1 to 1.6 in Europe and the United States (US) [4]. The majority of women (about 65%) are diagnosed at advanced International Federation of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (FIGO) III-IV, 5-year survival is only 48.8% of all the patients, and the
median overall survival is 24 months. However, the 5-year-survival rate varies widely among European countries, from 25.6% to 51.4% [5,6].

Conclusions

The differences in terms of treatments provided led the multidisciplinary group to identify reference centers, to promote centralization, to ensure uniform and adequate treatment to patients treated in regional centers and to promote a new audit involving all regional hospitals to a complete review of the all the EOC patients. 

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 ages/treatments of patients included in this study:

 Table 3  (age/treatments - including none) Characteristics of the 2163 EOC patients treated between 2007-2010

"Over the last decade, several studies have reported the importance of centralizing care of ovarian cancer patients to guarantee the assistance of specialized gynecologists, thereby improving prognosis/ survival [7-11]."