Radboud University’s teaching hospital has become the first hospital in the Netherlands to publish its own cancer survival rates, the Volkskrant reports on Thursday.

This allows patients to see if the hospital performs better or worse than the national average in treating various forms of cancer, the Volkskrant says. The Nijmegen hospital has monitored patients for up to five years after treatment.

The publication of cancer survival rates is controversial and has been the subject of intense political and medical discussion for years. Hospitals have been reluctant to publish the results because of bad publicity fears.

Next year

Radboud is publishing the survival rates for lung, cervical and fallopian tube cancer from now on. The rest, including breast and prostate cancer, will follow in February 2014.

‘This is the next step in healthcare,’ hospital chairman Melvin Samsom told the paper. ‘The patient is becoming more a part of the treatment team and we want him or her to be able to make choices about the treatment. But if this is how you view your patient, you have to give them maximum information as well.’

The figures show, for example, that a certain group of fallopian tube cancer patients have a lower survival rate than average when treated at the Radboud hospital.

‘We are publishing all the figures, whether good or bad,’ Samsom said.