OA: Editorial Improving the safety and quality of cancer care (0.048% cancer publication rate)

Editorial

 Although safety and quality are acknowledged to be important and although there has been some research in this area, in terms of the pervasiveness of cancer and in relation to the tremendous amount of cancer research performed every year, relatively little time and money have been devoted to safety and quality. For example, I examined the relative frequency of medical error research in cancer, as indexed by PubMed. There are 2,822,819 human publications indexed under the search terms “cancer” or “oncology,” 558,508 of which (20%) were published within the last 5 years. When the term “medical errors” was included in the search, a total of 687 articles were found, 270 of which (39%) were published within the last 5 years. Of the articles published within the last 5 years, 37 were reviews and 5 were clinical trials. The term “medical errors” occurred in the title of only 1 review and 1 clinical trial. In terms of relative frequencies, medical errors represented 0.024% of all cancer publications and, within the last 5 years, its representation had doubled to 0.048%. This example does not represent the entire literature regarding cancer safety and quality, but it does suggest a relative paucity of publications in a critically important area.

  Furthermore, these studies must be published so that the entire cancer community can benefit from their findings.