Best Practices for Oncologic Pathology Secondary Review: Methods and Overview

Guideline Objective

This document gives the background/rationale and general methods for the development of the 10 site-specific evidence summaries that are part of this series. Each site-specific evidence summary contains a summary of the relevant evidence and recommendations.

In this series of documents, secondary pathology review is defined as review of pathology specimens by a second pathologist that is usually initiated at the request of the patient or treating clinician, multidisciplinary case conference (MCC) process, quality control protocol, or as standard practice to review all cases at a cancer centre prior to treatment. Consultation or review at the request of the primary pathologist or prior to finalization of the primary pathologist’s report is not included in this definition. The recommendations in this series of reports do not address the special circumstance in which the primary pathologist was considered to be an expert or subspecialist in the area of pathology relevant to the specimens examined.

Research Question(s)

For what type of specimens and under what circumstances should specimens suspected to be or diagnosed as cancer have (or not have) routine secondary pathology review?