'Danger of mis-representation' over surgeons' tables

Surgeons who refuse to publish data about how well they perform during operations will be named from today as officials launch the first performance league tables for medics in England.

NHS officials will publish the names of some surgeons who decide not to publish their details alongside those of their colleagues.

NHS England said that "very few" medics had chosen not to be included in the national tables. The first tables will be published on the NHS Choices website from today onwards.

Patients will be able to see the number of times a consultant has done a procedure, their mortality rates and whether or not they are performing within the "expected range".

Professor Ben Bridgewater, outcomes publication director at Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP), says: "There's a real danger of mis-representation. I've seen the Telegraph and I've seen the people they've listed in that, I think the Daily Mail have done the same thing today. And I think that most of those people have one death out of a small number of patients. People die after major surgery, it's just one of the things that happens.

"When you apply the statistics to them everyone falls within the expected boundary, but if you've only done a small number of cases in the time period under scrutiny you can have a high mortality rate, which doesn't mean in anyway you're a bad surgeon."

Ian Martin, president of the Federation of Surgical Speciality Associations, explains that surgery isn't always a direct relationship between the patient and surgeon because "you've got specialties where there's much more variation in the patients being operated on, the conditions that they're doing, and many operations have big multi disciplinary teams, and in some very complex surgery you could have three to four surgeons operating at the same time."

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Friday 28 June 2013.