National Adult Cardiac Surgery Audit (NACSA)
The National Adult Cardiac Surgery Audit (NACSA) collects data on all major heart operations carried out in NHS hospitals and a selection of private hospitals throughout the UK.
What is Adult Cardiac Surgery?
Adult Cardiac Surgery includes all procedures performed on patients aged 18 or over that involve the heart or structures attached to the heart. For the purposes of this Audit we report on operations that involve surgically opening the chest wall and usually the pericardium (the sac around the heart). The most common of these procedures are: Coronary Artery Bypass Grafts (CABG), Valve surgery, operations on the Thoracic Aorta, or a combination of these.
Procedures on the heart performed with catheters (tubes inserted via arteries or veins to access the heart) are usually performed by interventional cardiologists rather than surgeons. These are included in several other national audits overseen by NICOR and are therefore not included here.
Adult Cardiac Surgery Audit (NASCA)
The 2023 NACSA looks at all procedures undertaken in NHS cardiac surgery centres in the UK, as well as six private hospitals and one from the Republic of Ireland over a three year period, between 1st April 2019 to 31st March 2022.
This provides an overview of the state of cardiac surgery in the UK during this timeframe (such as activity and trends), as well as reporting on several Quality measures.
The data are complete for all NHS work in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Scotland has chosen to audit its own data since 2020/21, so the three Scottish units no longer contribute to NACSA. Data is missing from three private providers that chose to not take part during the last three years (2019/22).
To prevent the main report becoming too lengthy some of the data is included within a separate Appendix. This contains many supplementary tables and graphs not within the main report.
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Clinical Outcomes Publication (COP) programme
The Adult Cardiac Surgery Audit participates within the Clinical Outcomes Publication (COP) programme which publishes information on all hospitals and consultants undertaking adult surgery. It provides data on in-hospital survival rates along with the total number of procedures performed on a rolling three year basis. This information is published on the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery website and is produced by NICOR after undergoing a thorough validation process. The latest COP outcomes of individual hospitals and surgeons for the three years between 2019/20 and 2021/22 can be accessed by following the links provided at end of this page. Graphs plotting all units together are also available within the Appendix to the report.
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Non-mortality outcome data by hospital
We have produced an interactive version of some of the non-mortality hospital level outcome data for the period 2018 to 2021. This includes a number of common serious complications seen after cardiac surgery such as strokes, post-operative bleeding and wound infection. This can be easily filtered by region, printed and downloaded (if you have any problems opening this please try in a different browser such as Chrome or Safari). More detailed analysis (including graphs) of non-mortality outcomes is also available within the Appendix.
Report documents 2023:
- Adult Cardiac Surgery Summary Report 2023
- Appendix to 2023 NACSA report (2019-2022 data)
- Key messages
- Line of Sight table
- Adult Cardiac Surgery (ACS) Interactive Report (2019-2022).
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Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery (SCTS) Clinical Outcomes Publication (COP)
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Non-mortality outcome data by hospital
Adult Cardiac Surgery (ACS) Interactive Report (2019-22)
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Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery (SCTS) Blue Book
The Blue Books are produced by the SCTS for both Adult Cardiac and Adult Thoracic Surgery as an analysis of the data provided by the units and surgeons. They are designed to describe the activity and outcomes for cardiothoracic surgery in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
SCTS Blue Book 2020 (National Cardiac Surgery Activity Report 2002-2016)
Previous reports for Adult Cardiac Surgery (NASCA) are available to download via the Previous reports page.
Project Manager: Samuel Perwaiz
Project Coordinator: Jane Kerr
Contact email: nicor.auditenquiries@nhs.net