[Clinical studies outside university clinics : What are the problems to implement this?].

The demand for high quality evidence-based surgical treatment in Germany and awareness of the poor quality of surgical trials highlight the basic necessity of randomized controlled trials. In six surgical trial centers a professional infrastructure for surgical trials is in the process of being established since 2006.The aim is the initiation of surgical multicenter trials which can be effectively conducted by local networking. To accomplish a timely recruitment of patients it is necessary to integrate surgical departments outside university hospitals into multicenter trials. With a questionnaire survey of non-university surgical departments in the federal states of Berlin and Brandenburg, interest, experience in clinical trials and structural conditions in these departments were evaluated. Based on the results of this survey the possibilities to integrate non-university surgical departments into multicenter trials and how a high recruitment of patients can be motivated will be discussed in this article.