GIRFT Vascular Report

You may well have seen that the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) national report on vascular surgery was released on 1st March. The report contains a number of recommendations for vascular surgical services in England, and some of these relate to the NVR.

The NVR team will meet with GIRFT to discuss any recommendations that are likely to require changes to the NVR datasets or the way that NVR results are published. These include:

• Guidance on the coding and recording of complex aneurysms, and the definition of elective/emergency or planned/urgent with respect to vascular surgery procedures.
• A proposed change to the post-surgical destination data item to include enhanced ward-level care.

The GIRFT report used NVR data that was published in the 2015 annual report—both clinical data from 2014 and key results from the 2015 organisational audit.

The NVR team has concerns about how some of the NVR data was interpreted in the GIRFT report, such as:

• the case ascertainment rate of lower limb bypass compared to HES, which was reported by GIRFT as 55%. We found it to be to approximately 90% in 2014.
• The recommendation that trusts and surgeons should improve recording of the Fontaine classification in the NVR. Where applicable, this is a mandatory field in the NVR, and so we feel that there shouldn’t be issues in recording it.

Overall, the NVR team support the aims and main findings of the GIRFT report, and hope that the NVR IT system and publications will aid hospitals and vascular specialists to achieve these.

Consultant Outcomes Publication—reminder of key dates

Just a reminder that we will be analysing elective infra-renal AAA repairs undertaken between 1/1/2015 and 31/12/2017 and CEAs between 1/1/2015 and 31/12/2017.