Variation in use of breast surgery and characteristics of hospitals' surgical staff.

OBJECTIVE

To assess whether and how the characteristics of hospitals' surgical staff can predict utilization of breast conserving surgery. We anticipated that the use of the procedure was more frequent in hospitals with a greater proportion of younger and female surgeons on their staff.

SETTING

Sixty-two hospitals with different level of organization for the care of cancer patient from eight Italian regions were included.

DESIGN

We collected information on the personal characteristics (age and sex) of all surgeons on the staff of the participating centers. A concurrent pattern of care study was undertaken, in order to assess the utilization of breast conserving procedures.

RESULTS

The use of conservative surgery was 16%, 20%, 31%, in centers with 0%, < 20% and 20-50% female surgeons respectively (p = 0.003), while no associations emerged between the mean age of the surgical staff and the use of conservative surgery. This relationship also held true after adjusting for other patients' characteristics, such as stage of disease, age and presence of comorbidity. However, overall the use of patient-related and staff-related characteristics to predict the number of breast conserving surgeries performed in each area was able to explain only 16% of the observed variability in the use of breast conserving surgery.

CONCLUSIONS

Even though in this study a large proportion of the observed variation in the use of breast conserving surgery was still left unexplained, this finding suggests that assessing the relationship between doctors' characteristics and the use of scientific evidence is an important topic for health service research and can be of some help in exploring variations in clinical practice styles.