Prospective development of a cardiac surgical registry

Interest has recently been expressed in developing an Australian adult cardiac surgical registry. Complete national registries of adult cardiac surgery have already been established in many European countries, the USA, Canada and elsewhere. Participating centres contributing to a national registry benefit by being able to benchmark themselves against norms for their particular country. A risk-adjusted database can help surgeons advise their patients of the chances of a good operative outcome. For a surgeon or a surgical unit, the only way to obtain a relevant risk model is to use their own data, and data from units in their particular country. It is also useful to have comparative data from other national registries to compare one's own country with international benchmarks. Since 1996, the European Cardiac Surgical Registry (ECSUR) has put considerable effort into producing unified datasets, harmonised with each other for worldwide use. In 1997, ECSUR launched a minimum cardiac surgical dataset. The worldwide launch of the full international adult cardiac surgical dataset is scheduled for July/August 2000. This dataset would be highly useful for application in Australia. The ECSUR organisation has the capability to analyse data from other countries and could perform this for Australia if requested. However, a better approach would be a national centre in Australia. Funding for national registries around the world has been obtained from Ministries of Health, participating surgical centres, and surgical software vendors. If an Australian national registry is indeed established it will find a ready-made, highly appropriate international cardiac surgical dataset sponsored by ECSUR and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons waiting for adoption by Australia.