Report of the Paediatric Cardiac Surgery Steering Group

The Thames Valley Strategic Health Authority (SHA) (which has since become part of NHS South Central) set up a steering group to investigate different methodologies and conclusions drawn on paediatric cardiac surgery outcomes across England. This arose from publication of several papers on paediatric cardiac surgical outcomes, including work by Aylin et al (Oct 2004) that used HES data for children under 1 year undergoing open cardiac surgical procedures to identify mortality outliers.

The group concluded that the Central Cardiac Audit Database (CCAD) was the preferred data source for paediatric cardiac surgery outcomes, in terms of coverage, completeness and accuracy when recording highly specialist diagnoses and procedures. It also made recommendations for HES comparative outcomes to incorporate linked mortality data, for the National Program for IT to be used as an opportunity to integrate HES and audit databases and for improvements to coding systems and their use.