Spinal operation statistics (FOI)

​Request

Could you please provide:

A

The number of spinal operations carried out at the General Hospital by Jersey-based surgeons each year for the past five years (I.e. not including visiting UK surgeons).

B

Any statistics held on complication rates, success rates or patient reported outcome measures relating to spinal surgery carried out in Jersey.

C

Copies of any audit reports, anonymised incident reports, or serious incident reports relating to spinal surgery carried out in Jersey.

Response

A

The table below shows the number of patients recorded as having had a spinal procedure from 2016 to 2020. 

Data Source: Hospital Patient Administration System (TrakCare, Report CDG4H)

The data has been extracted using the following OPCS codes:

• V22 – V47
  
• V49 – V53
  
• Codes V54.1 – V54.3 only from category V54  
• V56 – V70

Please note that the numbers are likely to be under-reported for the following reasons:

• clinical coding team have a backlog of episodes to be coded – this is thought to particularly impact 2020 data.  We have not included 2021 in this response as it is a partial year and the coding backlog does affect this year
• private procedures were not coded prior to January 2018 and are therefore not available to be included in years 2016 and 2017
• in a small number of cases a patient may have more than one visit to Theatre within their stay in hospital. Technical issues with the data mean that we are unable to tell how many of the procedures were spinal operations – therefore we have counted all hospital spells where the patient has been recorded as having at least one spinal operation
  

B

Statistics on complication rates, success rates or patient reported outcome measures relating to spinal surgery carried out in Jersey are not held. Article 3 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has been applied.

C

There have not been any serious incidents related to spinal surgery carried out in Jersey in the last 5 years.

Article applied

Article 3 - Meaning of “information held by a public authority”

For the purposes of this Law, information is held by a public authority if –

(a) it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person; or

(b) it is held by another person on behalf of the authority.