Thousands of patients are being forced to go under the knife for a second time because as many as half the operations carried out by some NHS surgeons end in failure.The disturbing finding comes from a study of bowel surgery, one of the commonest operations carried out on the NHS.

Patients whose bowel operations fail and have to be redone – usually because of bleeding, infection or leakage from the gut – face a four-fold increased risk of dying from surgery – up from 2.9 per cent to 11.9 per cent – and spend more than twice as long in hospital (27 days compared with 11).

There is growing concern in the NHS over variations in the quality of care between NHS trusts and individual surgical teams and about how to improve the outcomes of the poorest performers.

Researchers from Imperial College, London, investigated re-operation rates following bowel surgery to discover how wide the variation was and what might be done to boost performance. They examined almost 250,000 bowel operations conducted between 2000 and 2008 in England.

Predictably, the results showed that the trusts performing the most operations had the best results. But even among these there were wide variations, with re-operation rates ranging from 3.7 per cent to 11.5 per cent.

Overall almost 16,000 patients required further surgery to correct something that had gone wrong – one in every 15 procedures.

The study is published in the British Medical Journal. The worst-performing trusts and surgical teams are not named in the report, but an earlier study last April identified Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Derbyshire as having the highest death rate following surgery for bowel cancer at 15.7 per cent, or one death in every 6.3 operations.

Omar Faiz, consultant colorectal surgeon and lead author of the study, said re-operation rates should be used with death rates to measure the quality of care in the NHS across a range of operations, provided the data was proved to be accurate.

Re-operation rates of 50 per cent were rare and reflected very unusual circumstances, such as when non-specialist surgeons were required to operate in emergencies.

“If there really are differences in performance that can’t be explained then the professional organisations will have to look at that,” he said.

Professor Norman Williams, president of the Royal College of Surgeons said the overall re-operation rate (6.5 per cent) was “quite impressive” and compared well with other countries. “We shouldn’t be complacent. If some surgeons truly have a 50 per cent re-operation rate it is extremely worrying.”

The college had said specialist surgery should be centralised in fewer hospitals and had encouraged surgeons to monitor performance.

Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association said: “We are supposed to have an NHS with patients at the centre, but it is still far from a patient-led service. They might get a choice of hospital but they are never given details of individual consultant performance, except in cardiac surgery. If they can do it in cardiac surgery why can’t we have it right across the NHS?

“These findings also emphasise the need for consultants to have regular tests ["revalidation"] by the General Medical Council to ensure they are up to date – but we are still waiting for it to be introduced,” she added.

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/study-reveals-disturbing-rate-of-failure-among-some-surgeons

Emergency patients are being let down by the health service because managers are more concerned with meeting targets by treating those with appointments, the heads of Royal Colleges warn.

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, some of the country’s most senior doctors say they are “deeply frustrated” at the low priority given to Accident and Emergency.

Targets concerning waiting times and cancelled operations, introduced under Labour, result in managers pushing doctors to operate on patients whose care has been pre-planned, in order to avoid financial penalties. But they can also mean that those who come in as emergency cases are stabilised and admitted but then left to wait for surgery.

Studies have shown that elderly people with fractured hips who do not undergo surgery within 48 hours are less likely to regain full mobility. Younger patients with shattered pelvises, from motorcycle or horse-riding accidents, are less likely to walk again if their operations are delayed.

A report published on Thursday criticised care for the elderly, finding that two thirds of those who died within a month of surgery had not received proper care and that they had often been left in pain.

Most of those patients were being treated for bowel conditions or broken hips, which are usually admitted as emergency cases.

John Black, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said the report echoed concerns that surgeons had been raising for some time.

In the letter, Mr Black said: “It is a source of deep frustration to our members that hospitals have become organised to deal quickly with elective operations at the cost of properly managing emergency care.”

The Coalition’s reforms of the NHS could help by making hospitals more accountable to GPs for the care they provide, he said.

The letter was signed by Peter Nightingale, president of the Royal College of Anaesthetists; Peter Kay, president of the British Orthopaedic Association; Finbarr Martin, president of the British Geriatric Society; Mike Horrocks, president of the Association of Surgeons; and Clare Marx, the Royal College of Surgeons’ lead representative in matters of patient safety.

Mr Horrocks said: “In recent years, the NHS has been set targets for elective operations to bring down waiting lists.

“This has been fantastic for patients with non-emergency conditions, but came at the detriment of those who require urgent treatment as hospitals focused on hitting those targets.

“The new government has committed to moving away from targets and towards measuring and rewarding hospitals who deliver good outcomes and this report should provide further evidence that this approach is correct.”

Under Labour, patients had to be treated within 18 weeks of a referral by their family doctor.

Surgeons have told the Telegraph that this resulted in extreme pressure to operate on any patients in danger of failing to meet that target, ahead of cases that came in as emergencies.

Any pre-planned operation that was cancelled was recorded and the data published. The patient then had to be rescheduled within 28 days, adding to the pressure to give elective operations priority, doctors have said.

Mr Black added: “Surgeons have been saying for some time that emergency surgery is a Cinderella service in the modern NHS.

“We will only solve these problems if focusing on emergency care becomes a priority in the boardroom as well as the ward.”

Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, said: “It can be so debilitating for someone who has a fracture to be left for a couple of days or longer, waiting for an operation when the trust is focused yet again on meeting these pernicious targets. It is an appalling way to determine who gets care. An emergency should be an emergency.

“The financial rewards for elective surgery are more lucrative for the trust than for emergencies and that is why trusts continue to focus on elective treatment. We cannot make savings by putting patients through unnecessary pain and suffering.”

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/Emergency-patients-let-down-by-targets-say-surgeons

Hospital waiting times have begun to rise again after years of decline following the introduction of European rules on junior doctors’ working hours.Waiting times in the NHS had been dropping since the 1990s but the rules limiting junior doctors to a 48-hour week, which were implemented last August, had reversed the trend.

Thousands more patients were now waiting longer than 18 weeks for surgery because of eu red tape.

Ministers were seeking to renegotiate Britain’s position on the European Working Time Directive, including a possible opt-out for NHS staff. The Royal College of Surgeons carried out the first comprehensive analysis of how the directive had affected waiting times.

According to the research, the proportion of NHS patients having to wait longer than the 18-week target for non-emergency surgery such as hip replacements had almost doubled from 1.5 per cent 18 months ago to nearly three per cent in March this year.

Waiting times reached an all-time low at the end of 2008, with patients waiting just a few weeks for surgery on average.

However, since the EU directive cut junior doctors’ hours from 56 to 48 per week, these gains had been wiped out, the Royal College said.

According to data from the Department of Health, the number of patients waiting longer than 18 weeks — from GP referral to being treated as an inpatient — fell steadily from April 2007, when almost 34,000 people were waiting, to 8,674 in December 2008.

The figure remained stable at about 10,000 until June 2009, just before the new rules came in, when the rise began.

In March this year, it had risen to 17,515, a level last seen in September 2007.

John Black, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said the increase was predictable.

“If you have the same number of patients, no more doctors and ask them to work less then it is inevitable that the time available for elective procedures will reduce and waiting lists grow,” he said.

Almost two thirds of consultants now frequently operated without assistants because departments were so stretched.

Mr Black said most European countries had bypassed the legislation by either not monitoring compliance or, as in Germany and Holland, finding ways around the directive.

“We look forward to this happening in the UK,” he said.

Sir Richard Thompson, the new president of the Royal College of Physicians, said the directive had been a “complete disaster” for both patient care and the quality of training for doctors.

“We are not providing the service or the training that we require,” he said. “I cannot overemphasise the damage to service provision and to training.”

According to the survey, 80 per cent of consultant surgeons and two thirds of surgical trainees said patient care had deteriorated since the directive was implemented.

Dr Matt Jameson-Evans, a spokesman for Remedy UK, a junior doctors campaign group, said the impact of the directive on services was inevitable.

“Patients are simply not being treated by as many doctors as before,” he said. “A second consequence of this and equally important is that doctors are not receiving as much training as they were and this has serious implications for the future quality of care.”

The Royal College of Surgeons has argued for an opt-out to allow trainees to work up to 65 hours per week because they were not getting enough practical experience on a 48-hour week.

The Coalition has abolished the 18-week target, saying it was not backed by evidence that it benefited patients.

Dr Mark Porter, the chairman of the British Medical Association’s consultants committee, said the drive for cuts within the NHS was also a factor in the rise in waiting times.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/NHS-waiting-lists-rise-after-doctors-hours-cut

European rules are creating a generation of “lazy, clock-watching” junior surgeons who lack the skills to operate safely, their bosses have warned.
A year after the EU directive limiting workers to a 48-hour week was brought in for the NHS, 80 per cent of consultants polled by the Royal College of Surgeons said quality of care had already been damaged by the changes, with risks to patients who are repeatedly “handed” from one shift to the next.

The survey also found that two thirds of junior surgeons said their hours in training had been cut.

Children at risk through lack of training for doctors and nurses, report warns

Consultants who took part in the study were most damning about the impact of the changes on their trainees.

Among responses from more than 500 senior surgeons taking part were repeated warnings that the rules were creating a generation of “clock-watchers” with a “lazy work ethic” who no longer felt personal responsibility for their patients.

Trainees were now spending so little time in operating theatres that they would lack the “cutting skills” required to perform safely when they became consultants, many warned.

College president John Black urged the Government to take urgent action to address the concerns, having pledged in its Coalition agreement that it would work to limit the application of the EU rules in the UK.

He described the situation facing the NHS as “acutely urgent”.

Mr Black said: “Without action we are going to see a generation of specialists with less experience than any that have gone before.”

Many consultants responding to the survey said the changes – which began in 2007 when a 56 hour maximum working week was introduced, following EU legislation – were already changing the attitude of young doctors, who were becoming too detached from the patients in their care.

Marjan Jahangiri, Professor of Cardiac Surgery at St George’s Hospital in London said: “We have created a generation of surgeons who lack technical skills and operate within a “clocking off” culture where they do not feel personal responsibility for their patient.”

The surgeon said the change in attitude was “as fundamental and dangerous” as the lack of expertise among junior doctors, who now received far less training than their predecessors.

She said: “We have now got a system where trainees begin keen and motivated, become restless from a lack of training opportunities, and they will end up lazy and unskilled”.

The heart surgeon, 48, said that by the time she became a consultant, nine years ago, she had undertaken 900 cardiac operations. The current generation were likely to become senior doctors after performing less than 300, she said.

Consultants who used to do most of their surgery assisted by trainees said they were now often forced to operate alone.

While some juniors ignored the rules and came in on their days off, most had far less time in the operating theatre because of strictures limiting them to a maximum of 48 hours, including all time on call, as well as their night shifts, and time on wards and in Accident and Emergency departments.

One respondent to the survey described the directive as the “single most damaging factor affecting training and continuity of care”.

The surgeon added: “The most insidious problem is that it fosters the concept that you are responsible for a patient only for a shift.

“A consultant surgeon has a particular and continuing responsibility – we are training clock watchers whose work life balance is more important than anything else.”

More than half of the 982 consultants and trainees polled said they were not truly complying with the rules, with many saying they lied about the true hours they worked because of pressure from NHS managers.

Among consultants who did comply with the 48 hour limit, 56 per cent said they had only done so at the expense of patient safety.

Many of the risks came from the increased numbers of “handovers” from one shift to another, and the use of inexperienced locums to cover gaps in rotas.

While some respondents in the anonymous survey said only luck had avoided serious incidents, others described specific errors which they attributed to the new system – such as the removal of an eight year old’s ovary, instead of her appendix, by an inexperienced doctor.

Mr Black said the NHS was “skating on very thin ice” under the current system, given that most doctors said they were still working longer than the 48 hours,

Doctors described handover procedures between teams which were unsafe, inadequate and in some cases, non-existent.

Trainees also described despair about the system, with many saying their training had suffered, and others saying they were only managing to improve their skills by lying about their hours and working on their days off.

Estimates suggest the current generation of trainees will have spent about half as much time in training or on call as those who became consultants before the EU rules were introduced.

A consultant summed up the training problems as a “complete disaster”, adding: “I just hope my colleagues can look after me when I get old. The only problem is they are going to be getting old too.”

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/EU-rules-are-making-our-doctors-lazy-clock-watchers

Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson’s scheme for inspectors to be appointed by every health trust has been rejected by the BMA.
Ten years after the reputation of the medical profession was ripped apart by the Bristol children’s heart surgery disaster and the Harold Shipman murders, efforts to introduce regular checks on doctors’ competence, known as the medical MOT, have foundered again.

Leaders of the British Medical Association have detonated a bombshell under the latest negotiations, calling on the General Medical Council, the profession’s disciplinary body, to go “back to the drawing board” with its plans for five yearly checks to ensure doctors are up to date and have the necessary skills.

The repeated failure to agree on a system of checks during the decade-long stand-off between the two organisations has left patients without the fundamental protection of knowing that the doctor treating them is safe.

Under the current system, doctors join the medical register on passing their qualifying exams and may not undergo further checks on their competence for the next 40 years.

The GMC first proposed in June 2000 a system of regular checks for doctors. That provoked outrage and led to a vote of no confidence in the GMC at the BMA’s annual conference the same month, the first in its history.

Five years later the two sides were nearing agreement when Dame Janet Smith forensically demolished the plans in the Shipman inquiry, saying they had been so watered down that to compare them to an MOT for a car would be a travesty.

In 2006, Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, proposed a new scheme, including medical inspectors to be appointed in every trust to police the performance of doctors, which has formed the basis of negotiations since. Now the BMA has rejected these.

Its response caused disquiet among other medical organisations who suggested the association’s trade union instincts may have disrupted its professional good sense.

John Black, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said: “The BMA are being totally unrealistic. An awful lot of time has been put into this. We [the Royal College] will not be going back to the drawing board.”

Mr Black added: “Parliament has decided that doctors should be revalidated and what patients tell us is that they are amazed we haven’t been doing it already. We fully accept that the process must be made as simple as possible, consistent with its having teeth. But the public expect us to get on with it.”

Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the BMA, said: “While the BMA agrees with the principle of revalidation … [we] will resist any proposals that … take doctors away from treating patients. It is essential that any system we have in place is fair for all doctors across the board.”

The BMA said the main concerns were that specialist standards set by the Royal Colleges were “far too complex,” having Royal College representatives sit on revalidation panels was “unacceptable”, and no costs were given for implementing the proposals.

Dr Meldrum said: “The proposed system will do very little to weed out underperforming doctors but will add yet another layer of bureaucracy to the doctor’s role. This does not make sense at a time when doctors are facing increasing pressure to spend more time with their patients. With the NHS facing cuts, this is not the time to spend invaluable resources on forcing doctors to dedicate time to box-ticking and form-filling exercises.

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/doctors-fail-to-agree-tests-on-competence