Objectives: To calculate in-hospital mortality after lobectomy for primary lung cancer in the United Kingdom; to explore the validity of using such data to assess the quality of UK thoracic surgeons; and to investigate the relation between in-hospital mortality and the number of procedures performed by surgeons.
Design: Retrospective study.
Setting: 36 departments dealing with thoracic surgery in UK hospitals.
Participants: 4028 patients who had undergone lobectomy for primary lung cancer by one of 102 surgeons.
Main outcome measures: In-hospital mortality in relation to individual surgeons, among all patients, and among each of five groups of patients defined by the number of operations performed by the surgeon.
Results: 103 patients (2.6%, 95% confidence interval 2.1% to 3.1%) died after surgery during the same hospital admission. No significant difference was found for in-hospital mortality between the five groups.
Conclusions: The number of procedures performed by a thoracic surgeon is not related to in-hospital mortality. Reporting data on in-hospital mortality after lobectomy for primary lung cancer is a poor tool for measuring a surgeon's performance.