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Surgery

Answer

NHS England began the staged publication of mortality rates for individual hospital consultants in 10 specialties, leading a drive to give patients more information about their treatment, helping the national health service drive up and maintain the quality of care.

It is intended that publishing outcomes will encourage professionals to implement treatment options that are proven to be most effective for high risk patients, enabling an increased number of high risk patients to successfully undergo surgery.

Where possible, data are adjusted to take into consideration the risk of a procedure on patients with different risk factors. Improvements in risk adjustment methodologies will be stimulated by putting data into the public domain.

There will inevitably be a small number of outliers, which is where the consultant's data is outside an expected range. A surgeon could be an outlier due to the difficult cases that they undertake and does not necessarily reflect an issue in performance. It is important that the data is reviewed by experts so that the published data are properly understood by all.

Monitoring and evaluation of data on performance outcomes will be conducted by NHS England and Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership which will include surgeons taking on complex cases with high risks.

In adult cardiac surgery, where results have been published at consultant level since 2005, there is no evidence that publication encourages risk averse behaviour. There has been an annual increase in high risk patients receiving cardiac surgery in the United Kingdom. Despite these high risk patients being given the option of surgery, mortality rates have actually gone down significantly.

NHS Choices will act as the central hub of information and specialist societies and audits are encouraged to be innovative in the way that data are presented in order to stimulate further research.

The Department has not commissioned any research specifically surrounding the effects on patient outcomes from the surgeon performance data and publicly naming surgeons who do not publish performance data.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

163004; 565 cc807-8W

Session

2013-14

Subjects

Disclosure of information Standards Surgery

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk