Published surgical success rates in pediatric urology--fact or fiction?

Purpose: Parents counseled for surgery are quoted operative risks based on published results in the literature. However, outcomes from single surgeon or single institution retrospective studies are not generalizable. We assessed whether published outcomes were perceived to be representative of personal practice by pediatric urologists. We also correlated patterns of perceptions with surgical volumes and demographic variables.Materials and Methods: A survey of 26 questions on 8 topics was e-mailed to 269 members of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Urology. Topics studied included distal and single stage proximal hypospadias, pyeloplasty, ureteral reimplantation with or without tapering, bladder neck reconstruction, and single and 2-stage bladder exstrophy repair. Participants were asked whether their rates of results were lower, the same or higher than specific published outcomes on a 5-point Likert scale. Study participants were also requested to provide demographic data and to estimate their...