The Clavien-Dindo Classification of Surgical Complications is Not a Statistically Reliable System for Grading Morbidity in Pediatric Urology

Abstract

Although the Clavien-Dindo classification of surgical complications has been evaluated using adult surgical patients, it is being applied to pediatric populations. We hypothesized that this instrument is not well suited to children and sought to determine the reliability of the tool in a pediatric urological population. We replaced adult surgical cases in the "Survey to Assess Acceptability and Reproducibility of the Classification" from the original Clavien-Dindo study with pediatric urology cases and mimicked original study methods. The survey was distributed with the REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) tool, and Krippendorff α coefficients of reliability were calculated from the responses. There were 51 respondents and 40 complete responses. The Krippendorff α coefficient of reliability for the Clavien-Dindo classification (α = 0.487) did not achieve the minimum level of acceptable agreement (α = 0.667) with the pediatric urological cases, even when the disability suffix (α = 0.266) was excluded from the analysis (α = 0.632). The accuracy of the grading system with the pediatric urological surgical cases when excluding the disability suffix (410 of 550, 75%) was significantly less than the accuracy had been with the original adult cases (1,816 of 2,016, 90%, p <0.0001). While 89% of respondents (32 of 36) thought the system was appropriate for adults, only 49% (17 of 35) found it appropriate for children (p <0.001). The Clavien-Dindo classification of surgical complications is not a reliable tool for use in pediatric urology, where its accuracy is significantly decreased compared to adult surgical cases. Further study is needed to determine if findings are similar across all pediatric surgical groups.