Article Text
Abstract
Endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) is increasingly used in the management of hepatobiliary lesions, allowing staging and tissue acquisition. It is operator-dependent, and fine needle aspiration (FNA) of solid lesions provides an auditable standard; high-volume centres have shown excellent results for solid pancreatic lesion FNA with sensitivities of 92%–97%. The British Society of Gastroenterology guidelines stress that clinical quality should determine service provision, with geographical accessibility a secondary consideration. We set up the Wessex EUS network, working from a single hepatobiliary (HPB) pancreatic multidisciplinary team, with EUS provided in four local centres providing agreed standards and audit. Pancreatic solid lesion FNA results showed a pooled sensitivity of 94%, comparable with high-volume single centres. This demonstrates a network with good clinical governance is a plausible solution to providing a specialist service such as EUS and may be a roadmap that other specialist services under pressure could follow.
- ENDOSCOPIC ULTRASONOGRAPHY
- PANCREATIC TUMOURS
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors Conception of study Wessex Network EUS Group. Contributions to the article, revision of the manuscript and approval of final manuscript: all authors.
Funding An educational grant facilitating meeting rooms for the group was kindly provided by Cook Medical.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.