Surgical outcomes are increasingly being scrutinised through national audit and publication of unadjusted league tables.1 Two accompanying studies report different ways of measuring surgical outcomes and performance—one in groin hernia repair and the other in percutaneous coronary intervention.2 3 Public scrutiny of surgical outcomes should be encouraged, but the data and statistical analysis should be robust, meaningful, and accurate. Unadjusted league tables are often misleading because they take insufficient account of the patients’ risk factors. Commercial organisations can also produce in-depth analyses of NHS data, but many clinicians argue that the accuracy of the raw data is questionable and that such analyses are expensive and of unknown utility.

Encouraging clinicians to take responsibility for data analysis at local and national levels could improve our understanding of surgical results and help develop ways to improve outcomes. The outcomes studied should be important and easy to measure—for example, postoperative death or disease specific recurrence rates. Studies on “benefit” need further development before risk-benefit analyses can be used …