Utility of the Vascular Quality Initiative in improving quality of care in Canadian patients undergoing vascular surgery.

The Vascular Quality Initiative (VQI) is a national cooperative quality-improvement initiative designed to evaluate processes of care and outcomes in vascular surgery. The purpose of this report is to show the utility of such a database to provide insight into the standard of care provided, to highlight areas of local quality improvement, to benchmark our data against local, regional and national trends, and to ultimately improve safety in Canadian patients undergoing vascular surgery. We present the history of the database, its spread in the Canadian health care system and examples of quality improvements achieved from analyses of data recorded and retrieved from the VQI.

Outcomes at a single center after subintimal arterial flossing with antegrade-retrograde intervention for critical limb ischemia.

Objective: The subintimal arterial flossing with antegrade-retrograde intervention technique has been used to overcome antegrade recanalization failures for peripheral lower limb arterial occlusive disease. There are few outcomes published for this technique and we sought to evaluate outcomes at our institution over a 7-year period.

Methods: A retrospective review was performed of all subintimal arterial flossing with antegrade-retrograde intervention procedures of infrainguinal occlusive disease from 2009 to 2016.