Defining and Measuring Quality in Colorectal Surgery

Over the past 20 years, there has been a growing focus on quality and safety in both medicine and surgery. Many argue that this was ignited in 1999 following the publication of To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, which highlighted that up to 100,000 deaths per year could be attributed to preventable errors in health care delivery.[1] Coupling this with the unexplained variation in care across regions[2] and publicly reported patient outcomes, researchers have prioritized identifying actionable opportunities for improvement. To make improvements, however, we must first be able to define quality.