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Objectives: To produce an informed consent for CT colonography (CTC), to be diffused by the Italian Society of Radiology, aimed to make patients and referring physicians aware of CTC examination protocol, advantages and disadvantages, limits and potential related risks., Materials and Methods: Delphi method was used to create a consensus among experts on an informed consent for CTC. The overall agreement among different consulted specialists was evaluated and ranked using the Cronbach's correlation coefficient (α) at two time points: after the first and the second 'round' of consultation., Results: The Cronbach index was 0.84 at the end of the first round and 0.93 at the end of the second round. The number of disagreements dropped from an overall of 11-5, from the first to the second round., Conclusions: The experts were able to produce an informed consent for CTC, hoping that this may be the beginning of a process focused on implementation of quality standards in CTC.

Introduction: Autopsies are a fundamental moment of clinical audit that have been progressively decaying., Materials and Methods: The autoptic rates of 6 hospitals of Piedmont Region (1639 autopsies, years 1995-97) were calculated. The Positive Predictive Value and Sensitivity (indicators of concordance between clinical and autoptic diagnosis) were calculated for each diagnosis; all discrepancies were classified as type I (adverse impact on patient's survival) and type II (uncertain impact) clinical errors. The diagnostic performance of medical, surgical and emergency staffs were compared with one another., Results: Autopsies are rarely performed on the patients who died in hospital (7.13%). Independently from the diagnosis, the global concordance expresses a Positive Predictive Value of 37.22% and a Sensitivity of 47.71%. 401 type I errors and 307 type II errors were found. The best performance is reached by emergency staff., Aim: To evaluate the use and the meaning of autopsies in today's Italian healthcare organisations.