Elective & Emergency Surgery in the Elderly: Frequently Asked Questions

Data collected April 2008 to June 2008
Publication date: 11th November 2010

The deadline has passed for the submission of data - am I too late to submit?: No, the deadline has been extended to Wednesday 8th April. This is now the final deadline; any data received after this date may not be included in the report and your Trust will be marked as not submitting data.
We do not perform surgery at any unit in this Trust; do I need to inform NCEPOD of this?: Yes, we need this information to ensure our records are up to date, so we can mark your sites as not participating for a genuine reason. This will also enable us to send the organisational questionnaires to the right units for completion, and to ensure no further reminders for data are sent.
On the spreadsheet you ask for the details of the surgeon/anaesthetist, but we do not routinely record this at our Trust. Can I submit the data without this information?: Yes, the spreadsheet can be submitted without the surgeon/anaesthetist details. However, once we have sampled the patients we will require this information in order to send the questionnaires out. Once we have sampled the patients, we will contact you to let you know which patients have been included in the study, and therefore which patients we need the clinician details for.
We have come across patients who have only undergone procedures on the exclusion list (i.e. excluded but not carried out in isolation), or patients who have undergone procedures we think should be included who are not on your exclusion list; should we exclude them?: Patients who only underwent excluded procedures, (whether in isolation or who received multiple excluded procedure codes) will be excluded. If it is easy for you to pull these cases up prior to sending the data, that would be great. We will also be checking the data prior to selection to make sure we don't include any excluded procedure codes, so it is fine to include them in the download of data. We will also be updating the exclusion list prior to running the sampling to ensure we try to only include patients who underwent surgical procedures. If the patient only underwent procedure code E85.1 in isolation on their final admission, they can be excluded.
Should we only include patients who die in hospital or are you looking at transfers as well?: You only need to include details of patients who die prior to discharge on the spreadsheet; we do not need details of patients who were transferred out of the hospital following the procedure.
I would like to read the protocol - could you send me a copy?: Yes. All hospital/units/centres will be asked to take part regardless as NCEPOD need data from all hospitals for this study. Please contact NCEPOD directly using the details in the Contact Us section.

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