Health services must report perioperative mortality and morbidity, including surgical and anaesthetic, to the Victorian Perioperative Consultative Council (VPCC).
Note: We are reviewing our forms to streamline perioperative reporting. Please continue to report anaesthetic and surgical cases through the separate forms.
Surgical deaths
What do you have to report?
All surgical mortality where the final admission of the patient was:
- under the care of a surgeon (regardless of whether an operation occurred) or
- under the care of another unit and a surgeon performed an operation.
Who needs to report?
Surgeons and clinicians
How to report
Use the following online forms:
Anaesthesia-related death or illness
Anaesthesia-related death or illness must be reported within 28 days.
What do you have to report?
- A death that occurs during an operation or procedure (or within 24 hours of its completion) performed with the assistance of sedative, analgesic, local or general anaesthetic drugs or any combination of these.
- A death that may result (either partially or totally) from an incident during or after such an operation or procedure, even if more than 24 hours have elapsed since its completion.
- Any event related to an anaesthetic procedure that causes a life-threatening incident, temporary or permanent disability, or significant distress. Morbidity is categorised as ‘major’ or ‘minor’ according to its outcome.
Who needs to report?
Anaesthetists and anaesthetic departments.
How to report
Information to include
- The anaesthesia record
- The preoperative assessment, including medical comorbidities, previous surgical history, current medications, investigations, airway or other anaesthesia issues, etc
- The operation or procedure report
- A summary of post-operative events, including ICU/HDU if relevant
- Any relevant post-operative investigations
- (If mortality) a copy of the eMedical deposition to the coroner if applicable
- (If morbidity) details of the clinical outcome from the adverse event
- Other relevant data and/or documents, including age, gender, ASA-P classification, elective or emergency status, location of event leading to death, and location of death.
What do we use this information for?
We regularly report on perioperative harm to share the lessons and improvements.
Note: The VPCC replaced the Victorian Consultative Council on Anaesthetic Mortality and Morbidity and the Victorian Surgical Consultative Council. Read the review report.