One aspect of surgical quality assurance: complications in gynaecologic and mammary surgery.

This overview of the operative and post-operative complications encountered in a personal series of 10.190 classical surgical procedures out of 43.395 patients gives an idea about the nature and rate of problems in the classical way of surgery. While there is a new trend to abandon this way of surgery as much as possible, it will be useful, when other surgeons publish the results and also the complication rate in detail of their new techniques to compare the advantages and disadvantages and the final results of the different kinds of surgery. In cases of breast cancer the survival after 5, 10 and 15 years, will finally decide about all the different ways of treatment used at this moment. A larger and better consensus about all these treatments is necessary before a clearer opinion will be obtained.