A National Cardiac Surgery Database: why, how and when?

As users of large amounts of public funding, surgeons are increasingly being required to justify their activities. The provision of accurate risk-stratified data on cardiac surgical procedures and their outcomes allows for government review while also providing a means of achieving potential improvements to strategies for the management of higher risk patients. In addition, accurate data will allow for the appropriate assessment of results that fall outside acceptable benchmark standards. A management strategy may then be implemented, following peer-review processes, to examine the outlying results on an anonymous basis. The dataset currently employed in the Victorian Database is derived from USA and UK models, and it will be used for the development of a national database. This project has Federal Government support in principle, and, it is hoped, its eventual financial backing.