Quality indicators for early stage Hodgkin's lymphoma

The purpose of this project was to devise simple, practicable quality indicators (QIs) for the treatment of early stage (I-II) Hodgkin's lymphoma (ESHL), and to test their applicability retrospectively at a single large teaching hospital.

Of the available treatment guidelines, we chose the two eviQ (evidence and Quality, Cancer Institute New South Wales) documents first published in early 2012 (updated in 2015) for ESHL favourable and ESHL unfavourable (based upon German Hodgkin Study Group practice) as being most relevant to the Australian setting, and selected nine QIs from them viz. baseline staging investigations, discussion in a multi-disciplinary meeting, chemotherapy type and number of cycles, radiotherapy (RT) planning technique, use of dose volume histograms, dose, treatment volume and timing. We identified all patients with ESHL treated radically with chemotherapy and/or RT at the Royal Adelaide Hospital between July 2009 and July 2014, and extracted relevant data from hospital records. QI score for each item was defined as the percentage of patients who received care as recommended in the eviQ guidelines, and improvement potential as an indicator score <90%.

Raw QI scores varied between 74-100%. When corrected for clinical circumstances legitimising deviation from the guidelines, the range was 83-100%. Only number of chemotherapy cycles (87% corrected) and RT dose (83% corrected) had improvement potential. However, compliance after publication of the eviQ guidelines was virtually perfect for each item.

The chosen QIs for ESHL proved to be practicable to apply in this single centre review where overall compliance was high, and excellent in the latter half of the study period. We would encourage reporting of raw and corrected QI scores.