A national perioperative outcomes registry will facilitate quality assurance and research in Australia

Countries with a national approach to ethics and governance and to data collection have a distinct advantage in conducting large surgical outcomes studies. 'Knowing the Risk' was a surgical outcomes study conducted as a quality improvement activity in the United Kingdom in 2011.1 The study provided population-level data on high-risk surgical patients and critical care utilisation, and the data were used to develop the Surgical Outcome Risk Tool (SORT), a generalisable perioperative mortality risk calculator for adults undergoing inpatient noncardiac surgery.