Surgeons told to publish mortality rates or face penalties

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Northerner

Northerner

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Surgeons who refuse to publish their mortality rates could face sanctions, NHS England's medical director says.

Performance data for about 5,000 surgeons in England is expected to be released online on Wednesday.

Sir Bruce Keogh said publishing rates improved safety and the NHS was looking at "penalties to force that".

Some surgeons have warned the move could lead to consultants refusing to take on difficult cases.

They argue the statistics do not take full account of the circumstances of each operation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30072899
 
It's this blame culture isn't it?

Surely every single unexpected death is investigated thoroughly?

So what have surgeons got to fear?

Nothing unless they are inept, when surely they should and would get punished, as far as I'm concerned !
 
trophywench said:
It's this blame culture isn't it?

Surely every single unexpected death is investigated thoroughly?

So what have surgeons got to fear?

Nothing unless they are inept, when surely they should and would get punished, as far as I'm concerned !
Click to expand...

I think it's the picture it may present, without the detail, that concerns them. People will be looking for the 'headline figure', not the justification if it appears bad.
 
Are people seriously that thick Alan - or are we talking about the slant the err unpopular press could stick on it?
 
trophywench said:
Are people seriously that thick Alan - or are we talking about the slant the err unpopular press could stick on it?
Click to expand...

There's that, plus the fact that a prportion of the medical profession thinks that we are all too stupid to understand anything more sophisticated than a single fgure...🙄
 
Oh well FWIW my husband soon needs to have a small diagnostic procedure done that involves an anaesthetic, so this morning he's been for his pre-anaesthetic assessment at the hospital.

He was sent home with amongst a load of blood test forms a pre=printed blurb from the Royal Soc of Anaesthetists or whatever, telling him on 5 sheets of A4 printed on both sides, all about anaesthetics. There is one full side of possible side-effects and at the bottom it tells you that it is possible to die from an anaesthetic, but it only happens to 5 people for every million who have it, in the UK.

Considering you used to see em for about 15 minutes the night before the operation - and still got told what you actually needed to know, with enough time for you to ask if there was anything else bothering you about it - it strikes me that it's a bit OTT.

They've actually omitted to send him the leaflet about the actual procedure - we thought they'd just forgotten so Googled it anyway LOL - but perhaps it's because it's so heavy, the hosp can't afford the postage!!
 
This is the problem with modern society - in the interests of choice and transparency we are now so overloaded with information and decisions that for most people most of the time it is simply overwhelming and achieves nothing! 🙄
 
I doubt the dead patient would complain so why bother?
 
Well our local hospital - the George Eliot in Nuneaton - has been forever in the news in recent years for the number of deaths compared to the number of admissions.

Totally mad, cos a lot of services are actually carried out at UHCW, and say you have someone terminally ill, too ill to be looked after at home, needing nursing care and medications, to be kept clean and well - cared for properly - say with cancer and we don't have a residential hospice - where is their doctor going to send them to see out their days in as much comfort as they can, do you think? - yep the Eliot.

There's a full diabetes clinic - however the specialist foot team and the specialist Diabetes ward is at UHCW, so if your foot ulcers need in-patient care and you'll get better - Eliot send em to UHCW. They see the Foot Team, and get admitted there.
 
This information should be recorded automatically. I see no reason for opacity. However, the next step analysing the data should be done responsibly and not driving loud public headlines.

If done well it can highlight where results are outside the norm (either better or worse) leading to better overall treatment results.

Unfortunately, all too often the hungry rapacious 24hr news stations spin such information and destroy any such benefit. As well as the litigious public!
 
We're a funny bunch really, a couple of hundred years ago we all believed a divine force decided everything for us, now we think we control everything and all look on like idiots when a natural disaster shows us just how little control we actually have. Thus because we are in control of everything then when something goes wrong there must be blame because we're all too scared to acknowledge how precarious life really is. Mr Bloggs didn't die under the knife because he had the perfect storm of genetic and lifestyle indicators that made him the 1 in 100 for whom an anaesthetic is fatal, he died because the surgeon or anaesthetist did something wrong. Never mind that Mr Bloggs would have shuffled off this mortal coil anyway because he had a fatal tumour. All this will do is put surgeons under pressure to be risk averse, so all those bleeding edge surgeries that are high risk won't happen, no bleeding edge no development. They killed most early transplant patients on the table, but now transplants extend life. Chemotherapy killed most patients when it was first developed now it saves lives.

It's the same concept as league tables for schools, the nice schools who come top of the league tables get there because they don't take the difficult children. The inner city school who takes those difficult kids and turns 20% of them around is much more valuable but they languish at the bottom of the league table somewhere.

On the other hand if you've got a foot surgeon who routinely has 40% fatalities then you'd probably want to have a gander at that 🙂
 
Just three surgeons named as having high death rates

Just three surgeons have been named as performing more poorly than they should be under new data comparing the death rates of 5,000 surgeons in England.

Data published today on a central NHS website has been hailed as part of a “world leading transparency drive”.

The figures show that almost every surgeon in the country has been found to be operating within “the expected range” of performance.

NHS England said the findings should reassure the public.

But critics questioned whether the limits were set too widely, allowing surgeons to be labelled as “okay” when their performance was worryingly poor.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/n...urgeons-named-as-having-high-death-rates.html
 
I had a look at the web site and followed the link for hospitals and was amazed to see one of the local hospitals to me was OK for it's A&E service......... Ern it hasn't had an A&E unit there for at least 20 years. 🙄
So take all data with a bucketful of salt.
 
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