EuroSCORE

EuroSCORE stands for "European System for Cardiac Operative Risk Evaluation" (http://www.euroscore.org/what_is_euroscore.htm) and it is used in cardiac surgical theatres for "calculating predicted operative mortality for patients undergoing cardiac surgery" thus "a good measure of quality of cardiac surgical care" (http://www.euroscore.org/what_is_euroscore.htm). Effectively it calculates the risk of survival/death of the patient undertaking a cardiac operation based on 17 items of information in three categories "patient-related, cardiac-related and operation-related factors" (http://www.euroscore.org/euroscore_scoring.htm). These are then all taken into account and a formula is used (http://www.euroscore.org/logisticEuroSCORE.htm) to calculate the EuroSCORE for the patient.

All of the factors contribute to a final score/percentage chance of death and is used in a huge number of hospitals across the UK and Europe.

The data used to calculate the score was developed from studying "nearly 20 thousand consecutive patients from 128 hospitals in eight European countries. Information was collected on 97 risk factors in all the patients. The outcome (survival or death) was related to the preoperative risk factors. The most important, reliable and objective risk factors were then used to prepare a scoring system" (http://www.euroscore.org/what_is_euroscore.htm); which is a huge number of people and body of risk factors to develop a scoring system based on a patients risk relative to what has happened in the past.