Editorial
Cardiac surgical mortality: the tip of the quality assurance iceberg
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The recent hearings of the General Medical Council and the public inquiry into the "Bristol affair" have fuelled several high profile reports in the media, based on legitimate concerns that cardiac surgery, with its potentially profound adverse outcomes, was devoid of effective quality assurance. Two papers published in this issue of Heart take us one step further in the quest for quality management in cardiac surgery. The first paper from Wynne-Jones and colleagues compares activity and outcomes from four cardiac surgical centres in the north west of England and highlights a number of important issues related to reliable data collection, validation, and risk stratification.1 The second paper, by Sherlaw-Johnson and colleagues, simplifies the complex issue of presentation and display of outcome data by adding easily understandable limits to risk adjusted outcome graphs.2
The first report describes the highly successful North West Cardiac
Surgical Database initiative and demonstrates that where the
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