PostScript
Letters
Unacceptable variation in abdominoperineal excision rates for rectal cancer
1 Kings College Hospital, Denmark Hill, London, UK
2 West Middlesex Hospital, Isleworth, London, UK
3 St Mark’s Hospital, Harrow, UK
Correspondence to:
Dr O Faiz, Kings College Hospital, Denmark Hill, London SE5 9RS, UK; omarfaiz@aol.com
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
We congratulate Morris and colleagues (Gut Published Online First 5 June 2008. doi:10.1136/gut.2007.137877) for their innovative methodological approach that combined cancer registry with Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data. This represents an important template for future epidemiological research.
Certain assumptions that were made in this manuscript do, however, require further scrutiny. The reliability of the study data for potential quality-of-service distinction between colorectal units, as eschewed by the authors, requires validation. An important comparative study between the HES and Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland (ACPGBI) databases is cited as supportive evidence for the accuracy of the HES dataset.1 Although the latter investigation demonstrated concordance between mortality outcomes on HES and ACPGBI datasets following major colorectal procedures at a national level, concordance was poor at the level of individual trusts. Lack of reliability of coding on either dataset may have accounted for these differences but
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati What's this?
Relevant Articles
- Authors’ response
- E Morris, P Quirke, J Thomas, L Fairley, B Cottier, and D Forman
Gut 2009 58: 150-152.[Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]
- Unacceptable variation in abdominoperineal excision rates for rectal cancer: time to intervene?
- E Morris, P Quirke, J D Thomas, L Fairley, B Cottier, and D Forman
Gut 2008 57: 1690-1697.[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
Services
- Email this link to a friend
- Similar articles in this journal
- Similar articles in PubMed
- Add article to my folders
- Download to citation manager
- Request Permissions
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Topic Collections
Bookmark with
Register for free content
The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.
Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.
