The annual report of shanghai chest hospital—a view from abroad

This is the first annual report of the Shanghai Chest Hospital in which the authors describe the development over the past nine years not only in the different fields of surgery but also of the number of procedures performed.

An overview is given over the different sections (lung, esophageal, mediastinal, tracheal). All modern surgical techniques are available such as lung transplantation, robotic surgery or minimal-invasive procedures, the later accounting for an overwhelming part of lung cancer operations.

For each section a description of the most common procedures is added, nicely displayed in graphics. It shows an impressive number of cases with a steady increase over the last years.

The authors mention splitting thoracic surgery into several subspecialities which seems reasonable in view of the magnitude of their clinical work, experience and work load.

For esophageal surgery they describe that a multidisciplinary team decides on the treatment of each patients allowing individualised cancer treatment. The same is mentioned for mediastinal surgery. However, there is no such report about a multidisciplinary team approach for lung cancer patients. If one observes the dramatic changes in oncologic treatment for lung cancer over the last few years such an approach seems advisable for lung cancer as well.

Another necessity to be installed in the future is tumor documentation (not mentioned in this report) in order to report not only the sheer number of procedures but also the outcome or survival rates of tumor patients.

The authors mention participation in several multicenter studies or at least they plan to do so. Exchanging their ample expertise with thoracic surgeons worldwide can be a very fruitful transfer of knowledge.

According to their mission of “state of the art medical and surgical education”, they report that a large number of surgeons has been trained in Shanghai Chest Hospital, so it is to be expected that many patients from all regions of China will benefit from this training. Their sharing of knowledge is further demonstrated by an impressive number of publications over the last three years.

As improvement in patient´s care is a combined effort worldwide, the surgical community can look forward to further annual reports of Shanghai Chest Hospital.

Acknowledgments

Funding: None.

Footnote

Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned and reviewed by Dr. Wentao Fang, MD, Executive Editor-in-Chief of Shanghai Chest (Department of Thoracic Surgery, Shanghai Chest Hospital, Shanghai, China)

Conflicts of Interest: The author has completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at http://dx.doi.org/10.21037/shc.2018.10.06). GL serves as an unpaid editorial board member of Shanghai Chest from Jul 2018 to Jun 2020.

Ethical Statement: The author is accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.