Cardiac registers: the adult cardiac surgery register.
AIMS OF THE SCTS ADULT CARDIAC SURGERY DATABASE: To measure the quality of care of adult cardiac surgery in GB and Ireland and provide information for quality improvement and research.
Feedback of structured data to hospitals, publication of named hospital and surgeon mortality data, publication of benchmarked activity and risk adjusted clinical outcomes through intermittent comprehensive database reports, annual screening of all hospital and individual surgeon risk adjusted mortality rates by the professional society.


METHODS
All NHS hospitals in England, Scotland and Wales with input from some private providers and hospitals in Ireland.
1994-ongoing.


METHODS
Consecutive patients, unconsented. Current number of records: 400000.


METHODS
Adult cardiac surgery operations excluding cardiac transplantation and ventricular assist devices.


METHODS
129 fields covering demographic factors, pre-operative risk factors, operative details and post-operative in-hospital outcomes.


METHODS
Entry onto local software systems by direct key board entry or subsequent transcription from paper records, with subsequent electronic upload to the central cardiac audit database. Non-financial incentives at hospital level.


METHODS
Local validation processes exist in the hospitals. There is currently no external data validation process.


METHODS
All cause mortality is obtained through linkage with Office for National Statistics. No other linkages exist at present.


BACKGROUND
Available for research and audit by application to the SCTS database committee at http://www.scts.org.
Bridgewater
Ben
B
University Hospital of South Manchester, Manchester, UK. ben.bridgewater@uhsm.nhs.uk
D000328:Adult; D006348:Cardiac Surgical Procedures / Q000592:standards*; D016208:Databases, Factual / Q000592:standards; D006801:Humans; D007494:Ireland; D008498:Medical Record Linkage; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D012042:Registries / Q000592:standards; D013222:State Medicine / Q000592:standards; D006113:United Kingdom