Gastrectomy Complications Consensus Group
Perioperative complications influence long- and short-term outcomes after gastrectomy for gastric cancer. The absence of a standardized system for defining and recording complications and quality measures after gastrectomy has generated a wide variation in evaluating their impact on critical outcomes such as mortality, morbidity, cancer recurrence, survival, readmission rates, length of hospital stay, costs and resource utilization, and quality of life.
To address this issue, in 2015 a group of European surgeons belonging to the International Gastric Cancer Association (IGCA) designed and launched the project International Consensus on a Complications List after Gastrectomy for Cancer.
The newly established Gastrectomy Complications Consensus Group (GCCG) comprises
3 Principal Investigators
31 specialist gastric cancer surgeons from 13 countries in Europe
reflecting different health systems (click here for the complete list of the study participants).
Delphi surveys and group meetings were used to achieve a consensus on standardized methods for defining complications and quality measures that can be collected in institutional databases and national audits.
In 2017, the first step of the project has delivered a consensus on a comprehensive list of items, including the name and definition of each complication. The proposed list of 27 defined complications, published in Gastric Cancer 2018 (click here to download the article), represents the first step in developing an essential clinical tool for postoperative assessment of gastric cancer patients and quality improvement projects.
The newly developed Complications Recording Sheet through an electronic datasheet application for each patient episode will enable the Gastrectomy Complications Consensus Group to carry out (i) a retrospective multicenter study, (ii) a prospective multicenter study and, (iii) the establishment of benchmark results in gastric cancer surgery. Soon, the study will become an international initiative with gastric cancer experts and surgeons worldwide joining the Gastrectomy Complications Consensus Group.