Audit of prostate cancer: lessons learnt for current clinical practice, surrogates for quality of care and standardisation and quality assurance.

Two-hundred and fifty-one prostate cancer patients first registered during 1994 were sampled from a Regional Cancer Registry. In the six months after diagnosis, 39% received drug treatment alone, while 37% had no active treatment. Eighty-one percent of cases were histologically proven. Seventy-six percent had a prostate specific antigen (PSA) test and in 3% the PSA test was the basis for diagnosis. Of histologically proven cases 29% had a Gleason grade. None were staged by clinicians. Key lessons were: The result was a snapshot of current clinical practice which suggested other possible surrogates for quality of care, such as basis of stage and timing of investigations; There is a need for standardisation and quality assurance of the content of pathology reports; Standard treatment protocols would aid recording and comparison of treatments.