Utility of the Parkland Grading Scale to determine intraoperative challenges during laparoscopic cholecystectomy: a validation study on 206 patients at an academic medical center in Nepal

BACKGROUND: Most of the scoring systems to predict difficult laparoscopic cholecystectomy are based on pre-operative clinical and radiological findings. Recently the Parkland Grading Scale system was introduced as a simple intra-operative grading scale. This study aims to utilize the Parkland Grading Scale system to assess the intraoperative challenges during laparoscopic cholecystectomy. METHOD: This was a prospective, cross-sectional study done at Chitwan Medical College and Teaching Hospital, Chitwan, Nepal. All the patients underwent laparoscopic cholecystectomy from April 2020 to March 2021. Based on the initial intra-operative finding, Parkland Grading Scale was noted and at the end of the surgery, the level of difficulty was given by the operating surgeon. All the pre-operative, intra-operative, and post-operative findings were compared with the scale. RESULTS: Out of 206 patients, there were 176 (85.4%) females, and 30 (14.6%) males. The median age was 41 years (Range 19–75). The median body mass index was 23.67 kg/m2. There were 35(17%) patients with a history of previous surgery. The rate of conversion to open surgery was 5.8%. According to Parkland Grading Scale, 67(32.5%), 75(36.4%), 42(20.4%), 15(7.3%), and 7(3.4%) were graded as grade 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 respectively. There was a difference in the Parkland grading scale in patients with a history of acute cholecystitis, gallbladder wall thickness, pericholecystic collection, stone size, and body mass index (p < 0.05). The total operative time, level of difficulty in surgery, rate of help needed from colleagues or replacement as the main surgeon, bile spillage, drain placement, gallbladder decompression, and conversion rate all increased with an increase in scale (p < 0.05). There was a significant increase in the development of post-operative fever, and post-operative hospital stay as the scale increased (p < 0.05). The Tukey-Kramer test for all pair-wise comparisons revealed that each grade was significantly different from each other (p < 0.05) on the difficulty of surgery except for grade 4 from 5. CONCLUSION: Parkland Grading Scale system is a reliable intra-operative grading system to assess the difficulty in laparoscopic cholecystectomy and helps the surgeon to change the strategy of surgery. An increase in scale is associated with an increased difficulty level of the surgery.