UK, National Cardiac Audit Programme annual report published -includes a separate Patient, Carer and Public report

[Milkfairy]

nicor.org.uk/national-cardi...

[Horner88]

Thank you, Milkfairy, am reading with interest.

[Chappychap]

Excellent document, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

[Chappychap]

Incidentally, if anyone wants to dig deeper into the risk statistics of heart surgery then there's a very good book by a UK heart surgeon, "The Naked Surgeon" by Samer Nashef. It's the story of how the definitive international table of heart surgery risks was compiled and how simply being aware of risks has acted to improve surgical outcomes.

One of the things he emphasises, and that's relevant to the document Milkfairy linked to, is that a particular surgeon's survival rates isn't an automatic vote of confidence, a lot depends on the cases that the surgeon chooses. If a surgeon only accepts relatively low risk patients then they can have a terrific headline survival rate. But the heart surgeon who is willing to operate on older patients with multiple health problems will tend to have a worse survival rate.

And if you're really, really interested in the risk statistics (!) then I'd recommend reading through the EuroSCORE II report. You'll need a basic grasp of statistics, but this is the source document that your cardiologist and heart surgeons reference. It shows for example that the consent form you sign before heart surgery, that one that gives your risk of stroke, heart attack or death during surgery as 2%, is actually quite a crude average. In reality that risk can vary from about 0.2% to nearly 14% depending on age and other factors, and the EuroSCORE II report spells out exactly what those mitigating risk factors are.

[Milkfairy Heart Star in reply to Chappychap]

Haha, I am not the only audit nerd😊

[Shar28]

A lot of reading! Interesting, thank you.

[Healthyheart1]

Really interesting and a long read. Bedtime reading I say thanks Milkfairy x Sheena