NHS hospital readiness to embrace the proposed NICE guidelines on abdominal aortic aneurysm: a public perspective

Introduction The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence published a draft consultation update on abdominal aortic aneurysm, which was expected to be published on 7 November 2018. This article analyses the readiness of NHS hospitals and their workforce to embrace the proposed guidelines. Methods The trust and individual surgeon-level anonymised data in the public domain for elective, rupture and complex abdominal aortic aneurysm cases were collected and analysed for all the acute care trusts providing these services from the Vascular Society of Great Briton and Ireland’s prospective National Vascular Registry database. Results Of the 95 acute care trusts providing the service for the year 2017, the annual volume of infrarenal abdominal aortic aneurysm (both endovascular and open repairs) ranged between 0 and 137. Of these, 64 (67.36%) trusts had an annual volume of fewer than 60 cases. A total of 366 (approximately 75% of 490) vascular surgeons have performed 10 or fewer open abdominal aortic aneurysm repairs in three years (2014–2016) with a mean operating volume of 1.452 procedures per surgeon per three years (n = 254, median 0, interquartile range, IQR, 0–3, 0.484 procedures per surgeon per year) and about 51% of the vascular surgeons have only performed five or fewer procedures in those three years with a mean operating volume of 3.455 per surgeon per three years (n = 367, median 3, IQR 0–3, 1.151 per surgeon per year). Conclusion The observations show that most UK acute hospitals lack the optimum case volume necessary to embrace the proposed change in the guideline.