Surgical audit: do numbers provide good training?

There has been a growing realisation that good resource planning requires effective measurement of surgical workload by good surgical audit. This paper examines the general surgical workload at the Army's tertiary referral centre, utilising the ratio of operative workload expressed as Intermediate Equivalents to total Service Equivalent Value of a Surgical team. A suggested format to enable inclusion of specialist non-surgical therapies is proposed. The limitations of "number crunching" when assessing the value of higher surgical training are discussed.