Uptake and impact of synoptic reporting in a community care setting.

Background: Breast cancer surgeries have traditionally been documented in narrative reports. Narrative reports have been shown to be incomplete. Synoptic reports utilize standardized templates to record data and have emerged as an alternative to narrative reports.

Completeness of breast cancer operative reports in a community care setting.

Objectives: The narrative operative report represents the traditional means by which breast cancer surgery has been documented. Previous work has established that omissions occur in narrative operative reports produced in an academic setting. The goal of this study was to determine the completeness of breast cancer narrative operative reports produced in a community care setting and to explore the effect of a surgeon's case volume and years in practice on the completeness of these reports.