A patient’s health is “the most important” determinant of outcome after surgery

Andrew Klein (a consultant anaesthetist from Royal Papworth hospital in Cambridge, UK) tells Vascular News that research in cardiac surgery has shown that while the surgeon has a small, but important, effect on a patient’s outcome after surgery, it is the patient’s health that contributes nearly all of the risk towards their own outcome. So, improving the health of patients before surgery is the best way of improving their outcomes, he says, while discussing the UK’s national reporting of outcome data for individual surgeons, and centres.