Promoting perioperative registries in Latin America: More questions than answers

One of the main reasons for promoting the creation of registries in medicine is to monitor different approaches and their impact on adverse patient outcomes that affect quality of life or the probability of dying. Additionally, registries create the ability to implement comprehensive supervision, potentiating improved healthcare as a starting point for local, or even higher level changes, as is the case in countries like the United States¹ and Norway.²

The reliability of a registry in revealing the true cause of these events depends on the operating system used and its ability to identify errors in data entry. In turn, this depends on the expertise of the individuals in charge of the development.³ It is important for the participants in a registry to recognize the inevitability of errors, to know how to report them, and to develop strategies to address them, because there is no doubt that underreporting and no notification are the main limitations.⁴

We are currently building a prospective registry for major non-cardiac surgery. Our biggest challenge is to attempt to capture the data that is potentially lost because of the presence in the operating rooms of independent staff. We will focus on recording 100% of those data. We hope that, in the near future, more institutions in our continent will work on the development of these databases, in order to foster collaborative research.

Funding

The authors did not receive sponsorship to carry out this article.

Conflicts of interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.