Consultant treatment outcomes
University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust
(UHBW) was formed on 1 April 2020 following the merger of
University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust and Weston Area
Health NHS Trust.
The information on this page is historic. Visit the
UHBW About us pages for the latest
information.
NHS England has begun the staged publication of mortality rates
for individual hospital consultants in ten specialties, a major
breakthrough in NHS transparency. This leads a push to give
patients more information about their treatment, helping the NHS
drive up and maintain the quality of care.
The data - covering around 3,500 consultants can be seen on the
NHS Choices website (www.nhs.uk/consultantdata).
The data will initially be refreshed annually and publishing of
data in this way will be mandatory from next year.
How can patients use the data?
The information published so far includes how many times each
participating consultant has performed certain procedures and what
their mortality rate is for those procedures. You can see whether
or not the data for each consultant is within or outside the
expected range. Consultants who fall outside the expected range are
sometimes referred to as 'outliers'.
You can use this data to decide which consultant to choose
for your care. However, there are some important issues to bear in
mind when looking at the data. For instance, the vast
majority of the data has been through a process known as 'risk
adjustment'. This is a way of accounting for the different mix of
patients operated on by a particular consultant's team. Using risk
adjustment, outcomes are calculated as if all consultants operated
on the 'average' patient. This means that consultants who take on
particularly poorly, high-risk patients or carry out the most
complicated procedures don't appear to have an unfairly high
mortality rate.
However, not all the data can be 'averaged out' in this way.
Specific reasons for this are outlined in the introductory text for
each set of results. Where risk-adjusted data is not available,
actual (also called 'crude') clinical outcomes are shown. If the
data is not risk-adjusted, a consultant may have a higher mortality
rate simply because he or she takes on more difficult cases.
If you have questions or concerns having viewed specific
results, please discuss these with your GP or consultant.
What will the NHS do where consultants have high mortality
rates?
Any hospital or consultant identified as an outlier will be
investigated and action taken to improve data quality and/or
patient care.
When will data be available for other procedures and
specialties?
The results published to date were selected
because relevant data was already being collected for these
procedures and specialties. It is likely the programme will be
extended from 2014 when data for other conditions can be collected
and analysed in a similar way.
Where does the data come from?
The data comes from national clinical audits or data
registries which continuously review medical practice to check
that it is safe and seek ways to improve it. These audits are
managed by 'audit providers' (usually academic institutions such as
a university or royal college) which work with the specialist
association. A specialist association is an independent, membership
organisation, which represents a particular medical
specialty. Those specialities, along with the associated
societies and the audit/registry from which the data will primarily
derive from, can be seen in the table below. Clicking on the
links below will take you directly to the relevant society website
where you can view the outcomes.
