The College is delighted to have given its support to the National Hiatal Surgical Registry (NHSR).
The purpose of the National Hiatal Surgical Registry (NHSR) is to provide surgeons an effective tool to be reflective in their surgical practice in the treatment of hiatal surgical disease and benchmark outcomes for hiatal surgical procedures across the UK.
It is a database that will allow surgeons on a voluntary basis to enter meaningful and useful information about the hiatal surgery they perform for the purpose of auditing their outcomes and referencing themselves against peer outcomes. The registry will record details about patient selection, pre-operative investigations, intra-operative techniques, volumes of practice and most importantly outcomes. The registry has patient reporting outcome measures (PROMs) integral within it. The registry will automatically contact patients (with their consent-see GDPR policy) with regard to their symptoms at 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years and 5 years after their surgery. For anti-reflux procedures, the registry the will use pre-operative and post-operative GORD-QoL (see downloads page) scores and the need for continued anti-acid medication use as outcome measures. For cardiomyotomy surgery, comparison of pre-operative and post-operative Eckhardt scores (see downloads page) are used and for hiatus hernia repair pre-operative and post-operative Hiatus Hernia-QoL score (see downloads page).
Surgeons will be able to download a personal report based on the information they have entered for the purpose of their appraisal. A National Annual Report will also be delivered each year at the AUGIS Annual Scientific Meeting. This report will not be at the surgeon level, but at the unit level. Volumes of activity, complication rates and follow up outcomes will be reported. Individual surgeon users will only be able to see their own individual outcomes and these will be statistically referenced against the average of other surgeons anonymised outcomes for the same conditions. As an NHSR user you will not be able to see other surgeon’s individual outcomes. No other individual or organisation can view a User surgeon’s individual outcomes.
The registry aims to more specifically classify hiatal surgery to report more meaningful comparison of outcomes. The registry uses BBUGSS surgical hiatal classification to record hiatal procedure rather than relying on the very limited surgical procedural codes used by Hospital Episode Statistics (HES).