Understanding Children's Heart Surgery Data

Everything else

 

Terms used in this section

  • Survival rate. The percentage of operations where the child survived at least 30 days after their operation.
  • Chance factors. It is impossible to predict precisely what is going to happen in an individual operation. This is partly due to the inevitable inability to predict the future with certainty – all people are physically unique and will react slightly differently to medicines, anaesthetic and surgery, and no heart problem is exactly the same as another. The fact we can’t predict precisely is also partly because there are some factors that we think might influence the outcome of the operation, but these cannot be included in the statistical method either because they are difficult to define or no routine data on them is collected. Together, we call these all 'chance factors'.
 

1. Background to children's heart surgery results

  • Why do some children need heart surgery?
  • Why are survival rates after children’s heart surgery monitored and published?
  • How are survival rates monitored?
  • Where is the data from?

2. Understand the predicted range

  • Why is a survival range predicted for each individual hospital?
  • Why do the predicted ranges for each hospital differ in width?
  • When looking at just one hospital, what does it mean if its observed survival rate is outside its predicted range?
  • When looking at all hospitals, what does it mean if any of the hospitals have an observed survival rate outside their predicted range?
  • What happens if a hospital’s observed survival rate is outside its predicted range?
  • What is the risk adjustment method used by National Audit?

3. Limitations of these results and the data

  • Are there any limitations to risk adjustment?
  • How reliable are the data?
  • What are the limitations of the data?
  • What about longer term survival and quality of life?

4. My family or child

  • Which hospital should I go to?
  • Can the published data tell me about the risks for my child?

5. Who developed this site and how

  • About us
  • How we developed this site

6. Further resources about understanding clinical data

Funding acknowledgement This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research Programme (project number 14/19/13)
Department of Health disclaimer The views and opinions expressed therein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Health Services and Delivery Research Programme, NIHR, NHS or the Department of Health.