Professor Frank Keane:

That figure relates to the readmission rate for all surgery. It oscillates between 2% and 3% for individual hospitals. Looking at hospitals and their readmission rate is not especially useful. We are on a journey and readmission rates are one of the outcome measures. The other measures are process measures. If all of one's day cases are running into complications and being admitted the next day because of those complications, one is clearly not doing a very good job. It is important to monitor the readmission rate. When one looks at a list of different procedures, one usually gets a really low figure. We find it sits at around 2% to 3% for all hospitals. It is only when one becomes more granular in terms of looking at either specialties or individuals' procedures that differences begin to show.

Another issue is that readmission rates can be difficult to quantity because we do not have a system of unique patient identifiers. Patients who run into complications after a procedure might then present at a different hospital, in which case one does not have that-----