Table 1.

The number of hospitals, range of breast cancer surgical procedures per hospital and the number of patients by cancer stage

	Hospital volume
	High	Medium	Low	Very low
No. hospitals	3	6	14	177
Total no. patients	1987	2161	2134	2157
Range of surgeries per hospital	562–736	283–475	99–212	1–88
Range of surgeries per hospital per year	94–123	47–79	16–36	<15
Cancer stage
Localized	1126 (56.7%)	1220 (56.5%)	1139 (53.4%)	1090 (50.5%)
Regional	694 (34.9%)	805 (37.3%)	800 (37.5%)	790 (36.6%)
Distant	114 (5.7%)	114 (5.3%)	158 (7.4%)	211 (9.8%)
Unknown	53 (2.7%)	22 (1.0%)	37 (1.7%)	66 (3.1%)