[Comparison of mortality of lung cancer resections in France to other European countries]

France is characterized by the dispersion of its technical surgical platforms, and it seemed interesting for us to obtain information on quality of care compared to other European countries, which often have different organizations and practices. The objective of the study was to compare the 30-day mortality of patients operated on for bronchial cancer in France with that of other European countries.

We conducted a literature review on practices in different European countries. The terms used for the selection were: lung cancer surgery, 30-day mortality in different hospitals in European countries.

We selected 9 articles corresponding to 9 European countries. The correlation coefficient between the number of lung resections per year and the population of the country was 0.967. The linear regression model between number of annual lung resections and population showed that except for Great Britain, most of the countries were close to the linear regression line. Germany and France had a mortality rate of 2.887% and 2.937% respectively, whereas the average is 2.13%. Following sensitivity analysis, the mortality rates for Germany and France remained higher than the average.

France is among the European countries with the highest postoperative mortality rates. These results should induce surgical teams to adopt quality-of-care measures focusing on outcome analysis.