California begins to evaluate heart surgeons. Now surgeons won't take the risky patients?

Question

If heart surgeons take the most serious patients, the surgeon will run the risk of appearing to be a bad surgeon. Won't the real evaluation be if the surgeon will even take the patient now?

Answer 1

Before I judge a heart surgeon as "good" or "bad", I'd need a *lot* more information. What kind of heart operations is he doing? Does he do mainly heart bypass, which is the "easiest" surgery? (Don't get me wrong... all heart surgery requires a tremendous amount of skill and training, but bypass surgery is the least difficult.) Is he doing heart transplants? Or is he correcting Congenital Heart Defects in infants? One type of operation is NOT like the other two... not even close!

Your heart is roughly the size of your fist. In an infant, that means it's just about the size of a walnut. An infant's major blood vessels are about as thick as a matchstick. If a surgeon is operating on children with Congenital Heart Defects, he is at the top of his game.

To properly choose a heart surgeon, I'd have to know what type of surgery he specializes in, and how many he operations he performs per year.