The United Kingdom Cardiac Surgical Register was established in 1977 by Sir Terence English and Dr Alan Bailey. It is based on voluntary and annonymous reporting of activity and hospital mortality for all cardiac surgical procedures performed in National Health Service Hospitals.
This venture represented the first attempt by any surgical or medical specialty to capture nationwide data. Information on cardiac surgical procedures is collected by requesting each unit to return a standard questionnaire annually to the Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons. This unit based data is then aggregated, by Dr Bailey, into an annual report which has provided useful information on cardiac surgical activity over the years. Although mortality data is also collected this has not been rigorously validated and is probably under reported.
1999-2000 was the last year of the congenital section of the UK Cardiac Surgical Register.
The congenital section of the register had become beset with difficulties. Firstly, it was based on diagnosis rather than procedures which limited its value as a surgical tool. For example, it would indicate how many operations were performed for transposition of the great vessels, but not what kind operation had been performed. Secondly, the use of diagnostic categories made validation difficult if not impossible and left too much room for error. This has been clearly documented over the course of the Bristol Royal Infirmary Inquiry.
This section of the register has now been replaced by a report on paediatric cardiac interventions produced in conjunction with the British Paediatric Cardiac Association and Administered through the Central Cardiac Audit Database with mortality tracking through the Office of National Statistics. The This year saw the production of the first combined report which you can download in pdf format. This will take a couple of minutes.
