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The legacy of Bristol: public disclosure of individual surgeons' results
http://www.100md.com 《英国医生杂志》
     1 Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, Royal College of Surgeons of England, London WC2A 3PE, 2 The Limes, Charfield, Wotton-under-Edge GL12 8SR

    Correspondence to: B Keogh Bruce.Keogh@uclh.org

    Measurement of outcomes from medical or surgical interventions is part of good practice, but publication of individual doctors' results remains controversial. The authors discuss this issue in the context of cardiothoracic surgery

    Introduction

    A detailed analysis by the Nuffield Trust has shown that the arguments for and against publication are finely balanced.5 The reason for publication determines the way such data are presented. The two key reasons are either to facilitate patient choice or to demonstrate safety. Publishing for patient choice requires detailed, risk adjusted tables of outcome published in a comparative fashion. Publishing to indicate whether a surgeon is safe or not requires agreeing a threshold of unacceptable mortality and then showing where each individual surgeon's results lie relative to that threshold. This is analogous to the blood alcohol level test for driving—a driver is either above or below the agreed or legal limit.

    The comparative cardiac surgery reporting programmes in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York have been well publicised. The claims are that these systems are transparent and that in New York the associated scrutiny has resulted in a demonstrable reduction in post operative mortality.6-9 Counter claims suggest that this reduction in mortality is no greater than that seen across the rest of the United States and that in a litigious climate the data required protracted, detailed auditing and validation with the result that, when finally published three years later, the data are no longer relevant. Furthermore, there is a feeling in the US cardiac surgery community that an unintended negative consequence of public disclosure is that surgeons may be protecting their results by avoiding higher risk cases if they feel that their results are drifting into a range that might attract unnecessary yet easily avoidable scrutiny.10-13 The improvement in mortality is easy to show. The avoidance of high risk surgery is less easy to show because of the subjective and immeasurable nature of the clinical decision making process in these complex patients. This is a real irony because the evidence suggests that patients are the one group who pay little attention to these data. What they really want is an operation in a hospital close to home and as soon as possible.14-16

    Although the surgeon plays an important role in surgical outcome, so does the anaesthetist, the intensive care physician, and the intensive care nurse. Surgical results are also influenced by the socioeconomic status of the local population; severity of cardiac illness; prevalence of comorbidities; threshold of referral from both the general practitioner and the cardiologist; threshold of acceptance by the surgeons; standards of anaesthesia, surgery, and intensive care; adequacy of facilities and staffing levels; attitude to training; interpersonal relationships between staff; and the geographical layout of the unit (for example, in some units the wards are so far from the theatre and intensive care unit that surgeons have no time to check up on ward patients between surgery cases). So the concept of blaming the surgeon was perceived as unfair.17

    These concerns have been reflected in the decision by the Veterans Administration (the biggest US healthcare provider) to discourage the generation of surgeon specific outcomes. The administration believes the performance of a surgeon cannot be separated from that of his or her institution as quality is highly dependent on institutional systems.18 19 Others argue that it is the doctors who are best placed to change institutional processes that influence outcome and they are therefore a logical target.20

    Public disclosure of hospital and surgeon specific data in other specialties has not been well publicised but will gain increasing prominence.21 22

    We thought carefully about ways to present the data in the United Kingdom to avoid some of the pitfalls of the US models. We agreed we would base any risk adjusted comparative analyses on lower risk cases alone, leaving surgeons able to tackle more complex and difficult cases without unnecessary apprehension. The wisdom of this strategy was recently highlighted by a study in the BMJ confirming that risk stratification systems that may be good at predicting risk in large institutional groups of patients are much less reliable in high risk cases at the level of an individual surgeon because they tend to "under-predict" for higher risk groups. More importantly this study defined the level of predicted risk above which we should exclude patients from comparative analyses.23

    The national service framework for coronary heart disease

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