Dear Pritt,
The tragedy of the Bristol case is that surgery has a very long track record
of clinical audit, which is effectively policed by the royal college.
The confidential enquiry on peri-operative deaths apparently doesn't touch
on paediatric surgery...
A
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask]
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of P S Buttar
> Sent: 21 June 1998 20:24
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: RE: Bristol-surely manslaughter too?
> Not that long ago, I was involved in setting up one of the first clinical
> audits in surgery. To make it meaningful, I insisted that it involved
> looking at all operations performed by the surgical department, with
> statistics for average wait before operation, average inpatient duration,
> average complication rates, etc, with all figures further subdivided
> according to clinician and procedure. The first quarterly report was
> shocking - the variation in all statistics between clinicians was
> astonishing, with some eminent colleagues performing consistently worse
> than others. Not surprisingly, the project was promptly shuffled off into
> storage while those same eminent colleagues discussed how audit should
> continue.
SNIP
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