Complications in abdominal surgery: Assessment, prediction and prevention

Despite several attempts the assessment of surgical outcomes is not standardized and reporting of post-operative complications is still incomplete. Often, only complications judged to be important are selectively reported while ignoring minor and the occurrence of multiple complications. To address this lack of a standardized and comprehensive assessment, we developed and validated the comprehensive complication index (CCI) that summarizes the entire postoperative experience of the patient with respect to complications.
The current thesis presents some important tools to improve the quality of surgical research. The CCI seems to be a very promising outcome measure to contribute to that goal. Also, preventive treatment strategies as well as risk-adapted decision making models are potentially useful approaches to reduce postoperative complications and to improve the surgical quality.