Abstract
Objectives:
The urology-oncology service in NHS Ayrshire and Arran (AA) is nurse-led, with a multidisciplinary team (MDT) process at its core. Here, we assess the efficacy of this nurse-led service against similar services and consider it in the context of the new NHS cancer strategy.
Materials and methods:
Audit data regarding the management of patients with urological malignancies published by the West of Scotland Cancer Network (WoSCAN) were compared against pre-determined quality performance indicators. These data were used to assess the efficacy of the NHS AA service against the other WoSCAN centres.
Results:
All parameters analysed were comparable, except for the following performance indicators for which the NHS AA data appeared to show significant improvement compared with the other WoSCAN centres: the number of patients with bladder cancer with recorded TNM clinical staging (p = 0.012); the proportion of patients with prostate cancer who underwent transrectal ultrasound-guided prostate biopsy for histological diagnosis where a minimum of 10 cores are received by pathology (p = 0.043); and the number of patients with metastatic prostate cancer who underwent immediate hormone therapy (p = 0.031).
Conclusion:
Our analysis demonstrates that the NHS AA urology-oncology nurse-led MDT-based service is a highly efficient and well-functioning structure.
Keywords
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