Number of Bariatric surgery procedures

What this data shows:

Data capture is an important part of quality control of national audits.  It is expected that every bariatric procedure is entered into the registry.

How the data is gathered:

Surgeons and units do different numbers of operations.  Although in general the more operations a surgeon does the better the likely results, it is also the case that a surgeon doing relatively few operations may be concentrating on major, complicated revisional surgery.

When the data is shown:

Data collection is just one part of a process of care, and surgery itself is just one aspect of a multi-disciplinary team process of care that involves a wide range of healthcare professionals dedicated to the care of patients with severe and complex obesity. These include dieticians, specialist nurses, psychologists, bariatric physicians, anaesthetists, theatre teams and recovery staff, ward nurses including high dependency and intensive care nurses, out patient staff, radiographers, radiologists and exercise therapists. The close working and performance of the whole MDT is integral to the overall outcome.

More information about the data source:

Data are only available for those surgeons who are members of the British Obesity and Metabolic Surgery Society (BOMSS), and who submitted data to the audit over the relevant time period. Data are self-reported, or entered by delegates of individual surgeons, and have not been independently verified against other data sources.

Individual surgeon volume must also be interpreted with caution since units may only start surgery part way through an analysis period or a surgeon may stop operating if they retire or a service is moved elsewhere as part of NHS service changes. Surgeons may also operate on NHS patients in 2 or more hospitals so that one unit’s activity may not reflect the overall workload of an individual, nor take into account the surgeon’s volume of work in non-NHS sectors.

Data Source:

The data are taken from UK National Bariatric Surgery Registry, operated by BOMSS and Dendrite Clinical Systems Ltd.

Data Period:

Cases operated upon between 1st April 2013 and 31st March 2016 inclusive

Data Supplier:

BOMSS and Dendrite Clinical Systems Ltd.