Surgical report cards: the myth and the reality

Abstract

There seems no good reason for doctors to work in secret. Individual users of healthcare and the community in general, which ultimately bears the cost, are perfectly entitled to know how their health services and health providers are performing. The promulgation of surgical report cards has been hailed by some as a liberating step in the right direction. This paper seeks to analyse, from a clinician's perspective, the evolution and limitations of report cards. Ultimately, the importance of report cards will not be their immediate utility, which is minimal, but as a first step in a much wider and far more important debate about how we meaningfully measure the quality of health services and providers (including managers and bureaucrats), the likely cost of such an enterprise, how much we are willing and able to pay and how we reconcile the competing needs of information versus clinical and preventive care when all are competing for the same and inadequate pool of resources.