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Alan Saleh, Hamid Abboudi, MB Ghazal-Aswad, Erik K Mayer, Justin A Vale Division of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, St Mary's Hospital, London, UK Abstract: Radical prostatectomy is a commonly performed procedure for the treatment of localized prostate cancer. One of the long-term complications is erectile dysfunction. There is little consensus on the optimal management; however, it is agreed that treatment must be prompt to prevent fibrosis and increase oxygenation of penile tissue. It is vital that patient expectations are discussed, a realistic time frame of treatment provided, and treatment started as close to the prostatectomy as possible. Current treatment regimens rely on phosphodiesterase 5 inhibitors as a first-line therapy, with vacuum erection devices and intraurethral suppositories of alprostadil as possible treatment combination options. With nonresponders to these therapies, intracavernosal injections are resorted to. As a final measure, patients undergo the highly invasive penile prosthesis implantation. There is no uniform, objective treatment program for erectile dysfunction post-radical prostatectomy. Management plans are based on poorly conducted and often underpowered studies in combination with physician and patient preferences. They involve the aforementioned drugs and treatment methods in different sequences and doses. Prospective treatments include dietary supplements and gene therapy, which have shown promise with there proposed mechanisms of improving erectile function but are yet to be applied successfully in human patients. Keywords: erectile dysfunction, phosphodiesterase 5 inhibitors, vacuum erection devices, intraurethral suppositories, intracavernosal injections

A 72-year-old man presented with painless frank haematuria. Investigations included intravenous urogram and abdominal/pelvic CT which revealed a marked focal thickening of the wall of the inferior aspect of the left renal pelvis extending into the lower pole calyx and into the pelviureteric junction resulting in left hydronephrosis. Urine cytology demonstrated clusters of malignant keratinised squamous cells and schistosome ova. He underwent left laparoscopic radical nephroureterectomy and histology revealed moderately differentiated keratinising squamous cell carcinoma in the renal pelvis.

Bladder lymphomas are rarely primary tumours and more commonly associated with systemic lymphoma, either as nonlocalised bladder lymphoma or as secondary bladder lymphoma. Primary bladder lymphomas (PBL) tend to be low-grade mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) type, contrasting with diffuse large cell or follicular centre cell types more commonly seen in secondary bladder lymphoma. Bladder involvement by systemic lymphoma infers poor prognosis and patients often have no localising symptoms (typically a postmortem diagnosis). Other treatments are preferred over surgery for all bladder lymphomas, except where diagnosis is uncertain or for relief of irritative bladder symptoms. We describe a unique case of systemic high-grade B-cell lymphoma with simultaneous cutaneous renal and bladder lesions at presentation.

Adult renal rhabdomyosarcoma is a rare subtype of renal sarcoma. We present a case of a renal mass treated with radical nephrectomy that subsequently was shown to be renal rhabdomyosarcoma. We discuss the clinical presentation, imaging findings, and histology for this case and review the available literature.

Background: Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK and the sixth-fastest increasing cancer in males. Within England survival rates are improving, however, these are comparatively poorer than other countries. Currently, information available on outcomes of care is scant and there is an urgent need for techniques to improve healthcare systems and processes. Aims: To provide prostate cancer pathway analysis, by applying concepts of process mining and visualisation and comparing the performance metrics against the standard pathway laid out by national guidelines. Methods: A systematic review was conducted to see how process mining has been used in healthcare. Appropriate datasets for prostate cancer were identified within Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust London. A process model was constructed by linking and transforming cohort data from six distinct database sources. The cohort dataset was filtered to include patients who had a PSA from 2010-2015, and validated by comparing the medical patient records against a Case-note audit. Process mining techniques were applied to the data to analyse performance and conformance of the prostate cancer pathway metrics to national guideline metrics. These techniques were evaluated with stakeholders to ascertain its impact on user experience. Results: Case note audit revealed 90% match against patients found in medical records. Application of process mining techniques showed massive heterogeneity as compared to the homogenous path laid out by national guidelines. This also gave insight into bottlenecks and deviations in the pathway. Evaluation with stakeholders showed that the visualisation and technology was well accepted, high quality and recommended to be used in healthcare decision making. Conclusion: Process mining is a promising technique used to give insight into complex and flexible healthcare processes. It can map the patient journey at a local level and audit it against explicit standards of good clinical practice, which will enable us to intervene at the individual and system level to improve care. Open Access

This thesis outlines the proposed attributes of healthcare which can define its quality and reviews existing research in this area. Specifically, the limitations of existing research into the volume-outcome relationship within surgery are highlighted, thereby addressing the ‘health outcome’ dimension of quality of care. The principles and existing application of funnel plots within surgery are reviewed alongside their ability to overcome the limitations, risks and implications of contemporary ranking of surgical performance. Methods by which future research should be conducted are proposed as a conceptual model. This model, along with the proposed ‘quality’ attributes, identifies the research themes of the empirical studies. The application of a validated methodological scoring system formally explores the limitations of existing volume-outcome research within the uro-oncological field. A cross-sectional analysis of administrative data assesses the volume-outcome relationship for radical cystectomy in England, using an improved methodology that incorporates a multilevel model to account for the relationship and influence of both the surgeon and institution and adjustment for institutional structural and process of care confounders. Subsequently, risk-adjusted funnel plot methodology is applied to the dataset to further explore provider performance. A longitudinal analysis assesses compliance with healthcare policy for radical pelvic surgery in England by exploring the patterns of service provision, in response to the existing understanding of the volume-outcome relationship for uro-oncology. This thesis demonstrates the limitations with existing volume-outcome methodology and the need for improved methodology for both the interpretation and presentation of volume-outcome research. Appropriate handling of the data in volume-outcome analysis, which recognises the hierarchical nature, is important to adequately inform future service reconfiguration. Volume-outcome research is just one component of a quality framework that will help align healthcare with quality improvement programmes and must incorporate a multidimensional approach to measuring and presenting both the clinical and patient-orientated measures of quality of care.