Open studies
CASAP will review the type and quality of care provided to children undergoing emergency abdominal surgery in the United Kingdom. In doing so it will enable a comparison of the standard of care provided to be made against evidence-based recommendations and will identify variations in care between individual hospitals. Additional aims of this study include establishing the risk factors associated with postoperative complications in children having unplanned abdominal surgery, and validating the use of a well known scoring system which measures such complications.
We will collect data on all patients (aged 1 - 18 years) undergoing unplanned abdominal surgery in the UK over a 3-6 month study period. We will measure complications using an objective measurement system. We will also establish the longer term outcomes in these children by linking the data we collect with national databases held by the Department of Health. In carrying out this study we shall determine the acceptability to parents and children of having such data collected routinely with the aim to subsequently establish a longer-term national research programme aimed at improving the care in this patient group.
The Perioperative Quality Improvement Programme :
This application is to gather and analyse patient data using the PQIP Database.
PQIP will measure complications after major planned surgery and seek to improve these outcomes through feedback of data to clinicians. A REC/CAG application for the PQIP Database has already received a favourable opinion. This analysis will answer important research questions about variation in quality of care in major surgery.
We expect that this substantial collaborative work will lead to valuable insights regarding the ways in which hospitals use data to drive improvements in care.
