NICOR: National Institute for Cardiovascular Outcomes Research

NICOR

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Adult Cardiac Surgery

The Adult Cardiac Surgery Audit aims to improve the quality of care for cardiac patients by comparing local hospital performance with national agreed standards, outlined in the National Service Framework for coronary heart disease (NSF CHD) and to understand clinical trends within cardiac surgery in the UK.

The Bristol Royal Infirmary Inquiry into the care management of children receiving complex heart surgery, changed public and professional opinion about the need for greater public accountability. One of the key recommendations of the Inquiry was that there should be systematic internal and external monitoring of the clinical performance.

The aim of which was to identify and share examples of good practice whilst also identifying poor performance.

The government responded, with a promise to publish high quality health information about the quality of care, relating to specific units and, in time, specific consultants.

In 2003, the Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons (SCTS) agreed to use the Central Cardiac Audit Database (CCAD) - a technical infrastructure which provides a secure data collection and analysis service for the collection of datasets. This system is still used to date to collect and provide secure access to data, analysis and provides long term mortality tracking for all cardiac surgical patients to NHS and private healthcare organisations.

The aims and objectives of the audit are:

• to improve the quality of care for cardiac patients by comparing local hospital performance with national agreed standards
• to understand clinical trends within cardiac surgery in the UK
• to understand the impact of surgical interventions in heart disease and changing trends in treatments and medical care
• to understand which patients benefit most from which surgical intervention in relation to risk factors
• to produce data for the development of risk stratification models for outcome measures.

Case mix and risk adjusted mortality rates for hospitals and individual surgeons in the UK can be found on the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery patients' web pages. All analysis shown on these pages is based on data from the National Adult Cardiac Surgery Audit. 

• SCTS patients' web pages