CHI chief vows to reveal consultants' surgery outcomes to public

Children’s Health Ireland chief executive Lucy Nugent: 'My commitment is that any member of the public can see how we do from the point of view of outcomes.' Picture: Sam Boal/Collins Photos

The new chief executive at Children’s Health Ireland has vowed to reveal surgeon specific outcome data that will show how good they are at their job.

Lucy Nugent said the public will also have to be “educated” about how to interpret the data, so they can interpret it “appropriately”.

The move will be introduced in a number of years and follows a system that already operates all over the world, including in Britain where the National Health Service (NHS) has had a service running since 2014.

There, the performance data for thousands of surgeons is released by the NHS via an official website where people can check details — including mortality as well as success rates for individual consultants.

It is similar to a "Care Compare" website run in America by the country's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which allows people to assess surgeons based on their publicly-available performance records and look at reported experiences of their patients.

Germany likewise has similar systems, including one where patients are even able to rate a surgeon's friendliness.

Ms Nugent announced the move as part of a raft of measures she wants brought in to rebuild the public's trust in the controversial health group, which runs children's hospitals in Dublin at Crumlin, Temple Street and Tallaght, and an urgent care centre at Connolly Hospital.

Last year saw the group, which is due to transfer it operations to the new Children's Hospital by November this year, mired in controversies over failures in care.

It is still being investigated in relation to the use of unapproved springs in spinal surgery.

Ms Nugent, who took on the chief executive role just over a year ago, said: “My commitment is that any member of the public can see how we do from the point of view of outcomes.

“We want to be able to publish on our website — like a lot of other mature hospitals around the world do — our outcomes so that people can trust us.

“We need to rebuild public trust in us, and that's one way of doing it.

“So we are going to be open and transparent and show what we have done.”

In an interview with RTÉ's Today with David McCullagh, she was asked if she planned to publish the outcomes for individual clinicians “so people can make a choice between doctors”?

She replied: “That would be the long-term goal. I think you need to bring people with you when you're doing something like this. It’s what happens around the world.”

Mr McCullagh again asked if, in due course, people will be able to look up the CHI website and see which consultant “has the best outcomes”, pointing out that surgeons “are not going to like that”.

She replied: “You need to consider that consultant A might have poorer outcomes because he's doing more complex work than consultant B.

“So these things you have to educate the public [about] when you're doing something like this, to interpret things appropriately.”

She was asked “are consultants going to be happy about that”, and she replied: “It's like everything else. It's what does a mature organisation do?

“We're not there yet, and we're several years away from that.

“But why shouldn't a family member be able to know how good that person is? We do it in other aspects of our life.”

The Irish Medical Organisation was asked for a comment.