Information for Patients
This website tells you what we know about the rate of survival for patients who undergo heart surgery in different hospitals in the UK. You can use this website to look up a particular hospital or surgeon and find out what percentage of their patients leave hospital alive after an operation.
You can also find out whether the rate of survival is within the range that we would expect, taking into account the type of patients treated and how old or sick the patients are before surgery. We continually assess the quality of surgery and you will be reassured to know that surgeons themselves use this information to monitor the services they provide and to understand how they compare to other hospitals and surgeons.
The website has been designed in collaboration with patients and surgeons. It is intended to provide useful information about heart surgery. However, it is not the only information you should consider before making a decision about heart surgery. We would advise you to discuss any decision you need to make with your family doctor or a specialist.
How to read the rates of survival on this site
This website shows information about rates of survival for hospitals and surgeons across the UK. Information is available for all hospitals who provide heart surgery in the UK, although rates of survival for individual surgeons are currently only available for 29 out of 39 hospitals. Information about the rates of survival for surgeons from the remaining hospitals may become available in the future.
On this website information about rates of survival is presented in the following way.
In this chart the green box shows that the actual rate of survival for this operation is 98.1% (1). In other words 981 out of every 1,000 people treated at this hospital survived their heart surgery and were discharged.
Some patients are more likely to survive an operation than others, depending on factors such as age and their general health. Hospitals that treat more 'high risk' patients will have lower expected rates of survival than those who treat patients who are considered relatively 'low risk'. The white band in the chart above(2) indicates that, when age and severity of illness of the actual patients operated on at this hospital were taken into account, the expected rate of survival was between 94.4% and 97.1%. So, in this example the unit is performing very well.
Understanding your risk level
Surviving a heart operation depends on many things. One of them is how old and sick the patient is at the time of the operation. Another is how complicated or difficult the operation is. Many patients want to understand their own chances of surviving an operation. To understand your own chance of survival, you should discuss your circumstances with your family doctor and your specialist. There are ways of predicting the likelihood of survival for a group of patients. When we know the likelihood of survival, we can compare it to actual rates of survival to find out how well a hospital is doing.
On this website we measure likely survival using EuroSCORE and compare the results of hospitals and surgeons against it. The EuroSCORE website provides information for patients including a patient EuroSCORE calculator that allows you to calculate your own risk. However, some of the questions asked in the EuroSCORE calculator are complicated and you may not know the answers. If you want to use the calculator, you may want to discuss some of the questions with your doctor.
In the last four years, heart surgery in the UK has tended to be better than EuroSCORE predicts. As well as comparing results for hospitals against the EuroSCORE, we have also calculated the expected rates of survival by making an adjustment to the scoring based on the current UK only information. The adjustment for UK performance means that more people are expected to survive and is therefore a tougher comparison. This UK comparison is provided for hospitals but not for individual surgeons.
How patients have been involved in the development of this site
In developing this website we worked with groups of patients from the British Heart Foundation, the Greater Manchester and Cheshire cardiac network and representatives from Heart Care Partnership UK. More than 70 patients also responded to a questionnaire about the website. We have improved the design as a result of this feedback.
Both the Care Quality Commission and the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery are keen to supply useful information. We welcome your suggestions about how we can improve this website and the information we provide.