BMJ  2007;335:839 (27 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.39374.474965.BE

Letters

Surgical mortality

Hospital episode statistics v central cardiac audit database

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

We published the follow-up of the Bristol Royal Infirmary analysis to which Westaby et al refer^{1 2} and have some comments on their paper.

The online version suggests that the clinical teams did not verify the data. We wrote to the clinical team at Oxford over a year before our paper was published. After some months and a reminder letter sent to them, we received a response from the medical director of the trust which did not dispute our figures. His letter also confirmed that the trust had become aware of a downturn in their results before 2000. This was noted in our paper.

We have previously made clear the limitations of using OPCS4 codes in defining open operations, in that there is no explicit code for open heart surgery. We used a definition arrived at by consultation for the Bristol inquiry.³ Because this definition differs from that used within the . . . [Full text of this article]

¹ Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College, Department of Primary Care and Social Medicine, London SW7 2AZ, ² Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College, London W2 1PG, ³ Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College

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