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Patient Information Regarding the NBSR

The NBSR exists to collect important clinical information about all patients having bariatric surgery in the UK. This includes NHS and private patients. The NBSR was started in January 2009 and up to January 2016 has accumulated more than 50,000 patient records.

The NBSR:

1) Collects data to reassure patients about the safety of surgery. We published anonymised mortality data from the NBSR for every surgeon in the NHS yearly as part of the NHS Choices Consultant Outcomes Publications programme, as in many surgical specialties, (https://www.nhs.uk/Service-Search/performance)

2) Records information about obesity-related diseases so that we can demonstrate to commissioners, GPs and other healthcare workers how many of our patients are affected by conditions such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis and sleep apnoea

3) Collects data after surgery that shows the improvement in the obesity-related disease. This helps us show how clinically effective bariatric surgery is for patients and for the NHS

Patients are not identified by name or address in the NBSR. Each patient is allocated a unique anonymous number, but the database includes your date of birth, operation date, and gender. Our software provider Dendrite Clinical Systems Ltd keeps the registry in a secure Internet server, and this company fulfils all the legal requirements for Information Governance for the NHS.

Examples of published reports from the NBSR as can be found on other pages of this website.

In the future we are going to add patient identifying information (NHS number) and may seek ethical approval so that researchers would be able to apply to the NBSR Committee to carry out assessments on patients having bariatric surgery in the UK. It will be possible for an individual patient to opt out from the research use but not from use of the registry for national audit. This is because the NHS demands that very important information such as mortality and complications for each surgeon are correctly recorded, and reported in the public domain. Only combined data of large groups of patients will ever will be published for audit or research, and individual details like NHS number or patient names will never be put into the public domain.

If a patient wishes to contact the NBSR Committee directly to discuss any of these issues, or opt out of non-anonymised data collection, please use the details on the contacts section of this website.

Mr Richard Welbourn (Chair), Mr Simon Dexter, Mr Ian Finlay, Mr Marcus Reddy, Mr Peter Sedman, Mr Peter Small, Mr Shaw Somers, Mr Omar Khan, Mr James Hopkins.

NBSR Committee
January 2016

Download NBSR Patient Information Leaflet