Quality assurance in surgery

Today quality assurance in medicine is as necessary as usually. All occupational groups in health care - doctors, nurse, and administration - had to do this work together. In surgery there exist special courses, with the main point of interest: the operation. In Germany we had the first trials of quality assurance in health care by "External quality assurance": documentation of postoperative complications. But there was no great acceptance caused by problems of quality of the data. Therefore we had to look for new methods to introduce a quality management organized by medical staff themselves. The aim of this work was to demonstrate some tools for internal quality assurance: e.g. guidelines for diagnoses and therapy, preoperative risk analysis or documentation of postoperative complications. A standardisation of these tools can help to compare the outcome of surgical patients.