View article

Quality control of medical performance requires adequate ‘state-of-the-art’ data and this is currently not uniformly defined for radical hysterectomy. We have used data from a randomised multicentre clinical trial examining the clinical significance of surgical drains following radical hysterectomy (European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC)-55962). Although the study was not designed to analyse the quality of the surgical procedure per se, surgical data during and after the operation were carefully noted. A total of 234 patients from 12 European institutes were included in the study. We reported on the clinical and surgical characteristics, the radicality of surgery and short- and long-term complications of radical hysterectomy: median duration of surgery: 240 min; median number of nodes removed: 26; lymph node metastases: 22%; post-operative mortality: <1%; urinary tract infection: 42 …