14 18 One important criticism of existing tools is that their performance has not been "benchmarked" against clinicians' predictions of survival, making it difficult to judge the usefulness of these scales in clinical practice.
The 12-month overall survival in this study, 34.3%, also compares favourably to the benchmark overall survival of 25.5% (95% CI: 23.6 27.4%) established in a recent meta-analysis of over 2000 advanced melanoma patients enrolled in phase II clinical trials (Korn et al, 2008).
Benchmarks for survival are required for patient counselling and clinical trial design.
It is notable that all three treatment groups achieved a median OS of >13 months, the longest reported to date in this nonsquamous NSCLC patient population and well beyond the historical survival benchmark of 1 year.
A compromise to the above analysis, which might provide a better safeguard without financially stretching the orthopedic implant industries, would be to demand observed failure rates below the benchmark of 10% (≥ 90% survival rate), with upper 95% confidence limits for failure rates less than 15%.
The reported survival rate for each individual study in relation to the number of cases, follow-up period, and the projected deviation from the NICE benchmark of at least 90% survival at 10 years of follow-up is shown graphically in Figures 1– 3. We found 7 collum stem studies, reporting on 3 stem types in 540 patients (Table 1).
However, our study suggests that the PiPS-B estimate of survival could now act as the "benchmark" against which new prognostic tools are assessed.
Lastly, we performed survival experiments, the benchmark of any successful treatment regimen in human sepsis.
While there are corners of the NHS which perform poorly by national and even regional standards, the best clinical teams in the country benchmark their survival rates and other performance measures internationally.
A difference of survival skills.
