28.06.13
NHS England publishes consultant performance
Mortality rates are to be published today for individual hospital consultants in ten specialties, NHS England has announced.
The information will appear on NHS Choices covering a range of operations and procedures for around 3,500 consultants. Using national clinical audit data, it shows the number of times each consultant has carried out a procedure, mortality rates, and whether the clinical outcomes are within expected limits.
Cardiac and vascular surgery will go live today, followed by bariatric, interventional cardiology, orthopaedics, endocrine and thyroid, and urology within the next week. Head and neck, bowel cancer and upper GI will be published in the autumn.
The publication has been managed by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) and will continue to grow over time.
Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, national medical director of NHS England, said: “This is a major breakthrough in NHS transparency. We know from our experience with heart surgery that putting this information into the public domain can help drive up standards. That means more patients surviving operations and there is no greater prize than that.
“Surgeons deserve real credit for taking this voluntary leap. The public interest is clear but there were valid and proper concerns about the dangers of misinterpretation and a great deal of work has been done to address them.
“There will inevitably be a small number of outliers, which is where the consultant’s data is outside an expected range. It is really important that people understand that somebody could be an outlier because they take on difficult cases. It doesn’t necessarily mean there is a performance issue. Where someone is an outlier, it is important that expert colleagues review the data so that the issues are properly understood by all.
“This is a major cultural change in the way the NHS works and we expect this to take time to bed in. A small number of surgeons have so far not consented to their data being published but, as is our experience with the publication of cardiac data, we expect this to change over time with more consultants agreeing to their data being published.”
Health secretary Jeremy Hunt said: “We need to see a revolution in transparency in the NHS – publishing this data will not only drive better care for patients, it could literally save lives. Transparency is key to becoming the world’s safest health system – not just by today’s standards but by the standards we all aspire to.”
Jeremy Taylor, chief executive of National Voices, the national coalition of health and social care charities, added: “The transparency genie is out of the lamp but some people seem to have been trying to put in back in again. It is therefore very good to see this further step forward in clinical transparency.”
The data is available at: www.nhs.uk/consultantdata
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