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Ann Thorac Surg 2002;74:641-649
© 2002 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons

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Thomas B. Ferguson lecture

Quality, advocacy, healthcare policy, and the surgeon

^a Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, VA Boston Healthcare System, West Roxbury, Massachusetts, USA

* Address reprint requests to Dr Khuri, Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, VA Boston Healthcare System, 1400 Veterans of Foreign Wars Parkway, West Roxbury, MA 02132 USA
e-mail: shukri.khuri@med.va.gov

Presented at the Thirty-eighth Annual Meeting of The Society of Thoracic Surgeons, Fort Lauderdale, FL, Jan 28–30, 2002.

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Thank you, President Orringer, for your gracious introduction and for giving me the honor of delivering the Thomas B. Ferguson Lecture for 2002. Tom Ferguson is a giant in our field, exemplifying all that a surgeon and a human being should aspire to be. It is most fitting that we celebrate his legacy today with a discourse on issues that should matter very deeply to us as surgeons: the assessment of the quality of our care, the tools that enable us to advocate successfully for the well-being of our profession, and the dire need for us to shape the healthcare policies that affect us. Tom Ferguson would agree that there is a common thread weaving through all of these imperatives, the same thread that I hope to weave through my talk to you this morning. At the outset, I would also like to acknowledge my numerous colleagues in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP), including its executive committee, the more than 120 chiefs of surgical services, and the equally numerous clinical nurse reviewers. In particular I would like to acknowledge my co-chair of the NSQIP, Jennifer Daley, MD, and our lead biostatistician William Henderson, PhD.

These are hard times for surgeons. As we strive to improve the care of our patients and advance the boundaries of our respective fields, forces external to the surgical profession are setting for us standards for the care of our own patients, dictating to us the minutiae of our day-to-day management of these patients, deciding for us what is acceptable and what is unacceptable quality of care, and determining for us equitable compensation schemes. Take for example the latest of these external infringements: the standards that have been recently set by the Leapfrog Group. The Leapfrog Group is a . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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