Emergency surgery >> Surgeons’ workload

Surgeons’ workload

69% of emergency operations were performed by surgeons who had done five or more emergency AAA repairs in 2002/03.

As discussed in the section on elective admissions, these data must be interpreted with great caution.

Figure 14 shows the number of patients operated on by surgeons who performed no emergency AAA repairs in 2002/03, the number who performed between one and five, and so on.
Figure 14. Number of emergency repairs performed by the most senior surgeon n=264

There were 185 blank responses to this question. In two cases the surgeon reported that they had performed no emergency AAA repairs in 2002/03 and in 77% (61/79) of cases, the surgeon had performed more than five emergency AAA repairs in the year.

Workload and outcome

NCEPOD has examined whether the data available to NCEPOD can be of use in examining whether the outcome of emergency surgery was related to the number of procedures that a surgeon performed in a year.

As with elective surgery, because of the small numbers it is hard to draw conclusions about the relationship between the number of AAA repairs a surgeon performed and the likely outcome of patients admitted as an emergency who required an AAA repair. Once again however, the best results were amongst patients operated on by surgeons with the greatest experience of elective AAA repairs in the previous year.