How teams use indicators for quality improvement - a multiple-case study on the use of multiple indicators in multidisciplinary breast cancer teams.

A crucial issue in healthcare is how multidisciplinary teams can use indicators for quality improvement. Such teams have increasingly become the core component in both care delivery and in many quality improvement methods. This study aims to investigate the relationships between (1) team factors and the way multidisciplinary teams use indicators for quality improvement, and (2) both team and process factors and the intended results.

Actionable indicators for short and long term outcomes in rectal cancer.

Aim Of The Study: Although patient and tumour characteristics are the most important determinants for outcomes in rectal cancer care, actionable factors for improving these are still unclear. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess the impact of surgeon and hospital factors which can actually be influenced to improve on postoperative complications, disease-free survival (DFS) and relative survival (RS) in rectal cancer.

Methods: For 819 curatively operated rectal cancer patients, staged I-III and diagnosed between 2001 and 2005, data were derived from the population-based Cancer Registry of the Comprehensive Cancer Centre North East and supplemented by medical record examination.

Improvement of best practice in early breast cancer: actionable surgeon and hospital factors.

To identify actionable elements for improving best practice, this study examined the relative effects of patient, surgeon and hospital factors on surgical treatment variation of 2,929 early breast cancer patients, diagnosed from January 1998 to January 2002 in the region of the Comprehensive Cancer Centre North-Netherlands. Multilevel logistic regression was used to analyze the hierarchically structured data. Apart from the patient level, 43.