This one is by Stephen Westaby, a surgeon par excellence’, a great teacher and one of the doyens of British Cardiac Surgery and incidentally, one of my heroes. Unfortunately, his article gives a very unreasonable and blinkered view of the issues involved. In his article “ The shaming of heart surgeons: how politics brought a proud profession low ”, Professor Westaby writes “After multiple hospital scandals NHS England decided to publish surgeons’ death rates, ostensibly to improve confidence in the profession. Logically, you might expect the best surgeons to have the highest death rates because they act as a magnet for the most complex and sickest cases.
That’s what happened in the US when a handful of states were forced into the process by a hostile press. The rest refused to follow. But this was not an exercise in logic. It was a punitive act irrespective of the fact that most…
