ABSTRACT
Clinical governance is all about improving clinical standards in an open, information-rich environment. It has been described as 'the corporate accountability for clinical performance'. The numbers of patients who are managed by an individual clinician or even a clinical unit over a period of time that is short enough to allow for timely feedback are likely to be too small to be of much value for assessing reliably any of the more important outcomes, if analysed in isolation. Several professional groups have also developed, site-specific clinical data sets for different tumour types, while the Royal College of Pathologists has developed a series of site-specific proformas for the systematic reporting of pathological cancer diagnoses. In order to be able to compare the healthcare of patients with disease from one area to another, and in particular to assess the standards of referral, diagnosis and treatment between different groupings of clinical services, a knowledge of certain key case-mix variables is essential.
