Cardiac surgery at the BRI is provided by the division of Specialised Services. Surgery is performed in the new £62M purpose built Bristol Heart Institute where state of the art cardiac imaging, intervention and surgical services are based. We are a modern centre of surgical excellence with one of the largest academic units in Europe. We serve a population of 2.3 million people from Bristol and surrounding areas including Gloucester, Cheltenham, Bath, Swindon, Taunton, Yeovil and Weston.
Services provided
Adult Cardiac SurgeryThoracic SurgeryCongenital Cardiac Surgery
Rehabilitation and follow up
Follow-up at the consultant's outpatient clinic usually takes place 6 weeks after discharge. We have a cardiac rehabilitation team serving the local catchment area who also arrange continuity of care for those transferred to us. A second rehabilitation centre for South Bristol was recently established with BHF/lottery funding
Total adult cases for the year ending March 2009:
No. surgeons who undertake adult heart surgery: 10
No. consultant anaesthetists with any adult heart surgical practice: 15
Access
There is a shuttle bus every 5 minutes from the large multistorey car park in Cabot Circus (Bristol City Centre)to the front of the Bristol Royal Infirmary. There is a pay & display car park within the precinct but this gets very busy. There is short-term parking and a drop-off zone outside the main entrance. All entrances are wheelchair accessible. Bristol bus and coach station is 5mins walk.
Visiting hours
Visiting times are currently restricted to one hour between 6.30-7.30pm daily. The Trust is asking parents not to bring children under the age of 11 to visit.
Location: Bristol Heart Institute,Bristol Royal Infirmary,University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust,BRISTOL,BS2 8HW
Tel: 0117 342 6558/6559
Patients who are going to have certain heart surgery may find it useful to look up rates of survival for surgeons or hospitals they are considering and discuss this information with their GP or their surgeon.
Your own chances of surviving a heart operation.
2008/09 alone: Actual survival rate 98.3% better than expected (744 operations, with expected survival rate range 98.9 - 0.0%)
2008/09 alone: Actual survival rate 98.3% as expected (744 operations, with expected survival rate range 96.3 - 99.4%)
Statistics calculated from patients having all kinds of heart surgery.Factors such as ill health, increased age and lifestyle can affect a patient's chance of surviving a major operation. When we calculate the expected rates of survival we take these risk factors into account. Find out more about how expected rates of survival are calculated.
Factors such as ill health, increased age and lifestyle can affect a patient's chance of surviving a major operation. Examples of things that increase the risk of not surviving a heart operation are whether a patient has had heart surgery before or whether a patient has long term lung disease. When we calculate the expected rates of survival we take these risk factors into account The expected range of rates of survival shown in the white bars on each graph above reflects the overall risk of patients treated at the hospital. Some hospitals treat more high-risk patients than others and as a consequence of this the average expected survival rate for these hospitals is lower than other hospitals.
The main way of taking risk factors into account when calculating the expected rate of survival is by using what is known as the EuroSCORE method. This is a method of predicting the chances of dying during or within 30 days after undergoing heart surgery. This scoring system was based on information from many patients across hospitals in 8 European countries. In the last four years, heart surgery in the UK has tended to be better than EuroSCORE predicts so we have calculated the expected rates of survival by making an adjustment to the scoring based on the current UK only information. The adjustment for UK performance means that more people are expected to survive and is therefore a tougher comparison.
More information about how the expected rates of survival are calculated is included in about this site.
Mortality and survival rates are only one indication of the quality of surgical care, and cardiac surgery in the UK is now very safe with very high survival rates. Two other indicators of the quality of care are given here; the use of the left internal mammary for coronary bypass surgery and post-operative length of stay rates.
Given below is data on the use of the left internal mammary artery (LIMA) for coronary artery surgery grafts to the left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD). The LAD is in many ways the most important blood vessel on the heart. It supplies blood to a large part of the muscle of the major pumping chamber of the heart (the left ventricle) along with the majority of the muscle that sits between the left and the right ventricles (the septum). A number of clinical studies have shown that use of the LIMA to the LAD during coronary artery surgery gives patients the best improvement in life expectancy and the best chance of remaining free from angina in the long term. High use of the LIMA graft is generally regarded as an important 'quality measure'
Given below is information about length of stay following coronary artery surgery for each hospital in the UK. In general most patients who undergo this type of surgery should go home during the first week after their operation. Patients who develop complications may stay longer and those who get serious complications can stay in hospital for a long time. Here we are showing the proportion of patients who stayed more than 14 days after their surgery. This is a 'surrogate' measure of the quality of surgery, and also of the resource used by each centre (prolonged length of stay can be very expensive to the NHS). These results should be viewed with some caution - some hospitals transfer patients back to their referring hospital for convalescence after surgery which may make their length of stay rates appear artificially short, others may have a high incidence of patients who are very elderly or who have difficult domestic circumstances which may lead to long lengths of stay for reasons other than the quality of surgical care.