Healthcare Commission results

It is vital that patients undergoing heart surgery feel confident in the abilities of their surgeon.The Healthcare Commission, the independent watchdog of healthcare in England, recently joined forces with the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery in Great Britain and Ireland and launched a website containing information about the rates of survival for patients who have had certain types of heart surgery at different UK hospitals.

Chris Young's results show he has a higher survival rate than expected by European standards.

Click here for more information on Chris' surgical outcomes.

NHS 360-degree Appraisal

The National Health Service has introduced 360-degree appraisals aimed at improving the performance of clinicians through gathering the opinions of colleagues from all disciplines and from patients.

Click here to see Chris’ most recent NHS 360-degree appraisal

Variable Life Adjusted Display (VLAD) indicators

Variable Life Adjusted Display or VLAD methodology is a way of graphically representing an overview of clinical outcomes over a course of time. The graphs plot the cumulative difference or CUSUM between expected and actual outcome. It can also be used as an alerting system for when it may be necessary to investigation a surgeon’s performance.

Click here to see Chris’ VLAD/CUSUM plots

In Summary

- Since April 2005 Chris has undertaken 317 isolated coronary artery bypass cases, including redo cases, with only a single death (survival rate 99.7 per cent).

- Aortic Aneurysm surgery – it is impossible to collate meaningful data within this group because each operation is different from the last. The only exception is the results for thoraco-abdominal aortic aneurysms. These patients represent the most challenging aneurysm cases. Less than 30 of these operations are undertaken in the UK each year and only a handful of surgeons are trained in this area. Since April 2005 Chris has undertaken 22 cases with two deaths (survival rate 90.9 per cent). The predicted survival rate for this group of patients is 60 to 80 per cent.