[Legal principles and decision making of the Federal Joint Committee on minimum caseloads in operative medicine].

Minimum caseload requirements represent a regulatory instrument of the Federal Joint Committee in order to improve patient safety for elective, highly complex procedures or treatments. A relationship between case volume and quality of the outcome must be demonstrated within the scientific literature before minimum caseload requirements can be implemented. Furthermore, patients need to be allocated to hospitals which perform higher case volumes but without causing temporal and/or transport distress for them. The recent Health Care Development Act has opened up new opportunities to combine minimum caseload requirements with each other along with structure, process and outcome quality. The surgical community can provide a contribution to this structuring process.