Overview of surgical gastric cancer treatment according to the hospital volume in Croatia

Summary Gastric is considered neglected cancer in terms of stage at diagnosis and success of treatment worldwide. Early detec tion and quality of gastric cancer surgery remain the most important for successful treatment in terms of overall survival. In this paper, we focus on the overview of hospitals and volume of gastric cancer in Croatia as a possible baseline for quality assessment and implementation of existing quality guidelines. We accessed publicly available data from the Croatian Insur ance Fund for the period between 1st January 2013 to 31st December 2018. For background information on gastric cancer incidence and mortality, we used Croatian Cancer Registry data available online. We obtained both the number of resected gastric cancer in all Croatian hospitals as well as the length of stay. Data analysis discovered that there is a clear volume difference between teaching hospitals and non-teaching hospitals; only the first have sufficient volume for quality audit. This overview stresses one of the most critical points in cancer surgery, volume of surgery as a quality indicator.