Quality Indicators: Advanced Ovarian Cancer Surgery

Chaired by Prof. Denis Querleu (France), this project was aimed at developing clinically relevant and evidence-based criteria for the quality assessment of ovarian cancer surgery throughout Europe.

The ultimate goal is to improve the quality of surgery for advanced ovarian cancer and to build a network of European institutions, which meet the standards of proper ovarian cancer surgery and can then be awarded an ESGO recognition for ovarian cancer surgery.

The outcomes were presented at ESGO19 in Nice, and will be published in international journals.

Method

Quality indicators for advanced ovarian cancer surgery were developed using a four-step evaluation process inspired by published development processes and earlier initiatives, identified from a systematic literature search carried out in MEDLINE and selected websites.

This process development included the nomination of an international Development Group (23 experts), identification of potential quality indicators in the literature, literature search for scientific evidence, evaluation of the potential quality indicators, synthesis of scientific evidence, external evaluation of the retained quality indicators (by 84 independent physicians and 8 ovarian cancer patients).