The Committee recommends that the Minister for Health and Ageing develop a national register of bariatric surgery with the appropriate stakeholders. The register should capture data on the number of patients, the success of surgery and any possible complications. The data that is generated should be used to track the long-term success and cost-effectiveness of bariatric surgery.
Agreed in principle.
Data on bariatric surgery is currently available through the National Hospital Morbidity Database, a compilation of episode-level records from data collection systems in Australian hospitals. The database contains information on admitted patients in almost all hospitals. The database is managed by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Additional data is also available through the analysis of MBS claims for bariatric surgery.
A national register of bariatric surgery would build upon these current data sources to enable the long term tracking of patients and surgical outcomes. To ensure the data produced by the register is suitable for assessing the success of surgery and providing suitable research data, the development of such a register needs to be driven by experts and researchers in obesity surgery. Possible sources of seed funding for the register could include research grants, while ongoing funding could be provided through a levy on surgeries. The Obesity Surgery Society of Australian & New Zealand has initiated a registry which is currently in the final pilot stage of testing with full implementation planned for early 2013. At present the Department of Health and Ageing has not been involved in its development.
The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care officially commenced as an independent, statutory authority on 1 July 2011, under the National Health and Hospitals Network Act 2011. The key functions of the permanent Commission, as outlined in the legislation, include developing national safety and clinical standards, formulating and implementing national accreditation schemes, national data set development and reporting and publishing on safety and quality. The Commission developed Strategic and Operating Principles for Clinical Quality Registries that were endorsed by Health Ministers. These principles could be applied to the development of a national bariatric surgery register. The Commission is currently working on prioritisation criteria, national health data governance arrangements and costed technical options for clinical quality registries. The outputs of this work will be available in 2013. The Commission does not fund or host specific clinical registries. In addition, the Commission is conducting a consultation for the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing on registers for high-risk implantable devices, regarding recalls and limited post market surveillance.