When faced with a cancer diagnosis, the most pressing thought is choosing the right hospital in which to be treated, especially for surgery.
Finding your way is not easy: in this area, almost one hospital in two performs sub-threshold operations, i.e. too few operations, and only 13 have the quality mark for care pathways.
This is the picture that emerges from the new updated map 'Where do I get treatment?', presented today by Ropi (Italian Oncology Patients Network) to the Ministry of Health and elaborated starting from the data of the Agenas National Outcomes Programme.
The report shows that in our country approximately 46% of hospitals perform below-threshold oncological surgery.
For breast cancer, for example, the threshold value is 150 operations per year.
It means that below the threshold the center is not able to offer safety and quality of outcomes like those that operate above the threshold.
However, the new map confirms a decreasing trend of interventions in below-threshold structures, structures which from 2017 to 2022 reduced by over 16%, going from 5,670 to 4,747.
On the other hand, there was an increase in the volumes of oncological surgery operations in hospitals above the set ceiling.
However, the North-South gradient remains unchanged, with the North in which the majority of the Regions have hospitals above the threshold for all 17 pathologies considered, and the South in which only 3 regions (Puglia, Campania and Sicily) cover all the pathologies.
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