Private hospitals 'must do more’ on patient safety

The Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) is calling for independent hospitals to collect and publish equivalent data to that which the NHS routinely provides on patient safety and clinical audits.

Publishing a position statement, setting out the changes to standards in the independent sector it believes are required to prevent a repeat of the harm caused by rogue breast surgeon, Ian Paterson, the college says that while progress has undoubtedly been made to improve the collection and publication of data in the independent sector, key issues remain.

Therefore, the statement says that further regulatory alignment is needed to bring independent sector hospitals’ reporting requirements for patient safety and outcomes data in line with the NHS. While the independent sector has a duty to report data around unexpected deaths, never events and serious injuries directly to the Care Quality Commission, the data is not routinely published. The RCS says this needs to change.

The independent sector doesn’t yet have a data set equivalent to Hospital Episode Statistics - the dataset that publishes how many and what procedures have happened in the NHS, and the RCS believes that the independent sector has not been enabled to contribute to the majority of national clinical audits that collect data on care outcomes.

To assure parity in safety standards, the statement also claims that new surgical procedures and devices used in either the independent or NHS sectors should be registered, with related data collected in the appropriate national audits, before they are routinely offered to patients, and that the appraisal process underpinning the medical revalidation system should be reviewed to improve the sharing of information about a doctor’s performance between the independent and NHS sectors.

Derek Alderson, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, said: “The surgical community was deeply shocked by the case of Ian Paterson, the surgeon convicted of intentionally wounding patients by carrying out unnecessary breast surgery operations. While the vast majority of doctors perform their work to a high standard with the utmost care for their patients, the case of Ian Paterson highlights the need for an urgent review of how we assure safety standards in the independent sector.

“There is no doubt that Ian Paterson was a rogue individual. That said, the entire healthcare sector must do more to prevent someone like him from ever causing harm again. This starts with being able to collect and analyse good quality patient safety and outcomes data. There must be stronger oversight and protection for patients, regardless of whether they have their operation in an NHS hospital or in the independent sector.”