At the 1998 Annual Business meeting of the Society it was decided that surgeon specific data should be collected on marker operations in order to help restore public confidence in our specialty. The following mechanism was debated and approved:

• Each unit should nominate a lead clinician in audit
• This individual should be responsible for submission of data to the Society
• To eliminate assessment bias and avoid potential embarrassment each unit should anonymise all surgeon specific data.
• This anonymised surgeon specific data should be submitted as part of the unit's Thoracic Surgical Register return to the Secretary of the Society, who will then remove the unit identifiers (as is present practice) prior to forwarding the data to a third party.
• The anonymised data will be processed along with the standard Thoracic Surgical Register Returns by the third party
• If an individual’s mortality falls above two standard deviations greater than the national mean the President will write to the Audit Clinician in the appropriate unit inviting a response.

Please complete the form below, maintaining anonymity by allocating each surgeon an alphabetical identifier. This identifier must remain the same for future returns.

Include all patients nominally under the care of each consultant, irrespective of who performed the operation

Death is defined as death on the same admission as surgery in the base hospital. This is easy to validate, but makes the assumption that terminal patients are not transferred out to other hospitals

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© 1998 Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery in Great Britain and Ireland.