LAUSR

Tonsillectomy is the most common operation in children in the UK, with 37 000 procedures performed between 2016 and 2017 in the UK.1 With such a common procedure, it is important to ensure parents and patients are correctly informed of the risks involved. Personal and departmental audit data are important, of course, but in order to produce reliable estimates of uncommon complications, very large data sets are required. National audits and registries have produced useful data based on large numbers of cases,2– 5 but they rely on surgeons completing data forms for each case, and this inevitably means that some data will be lost, particularly followup data on complications such as readmissions and bleeds. Studies based on routine health service data6– 8 may be more complete as long as the coding of hospital episodes is accurate. Though data exist on the risks of tonsillectomy in children, the quality of the data varies. Estimates of risk for rare events such as death rely on large amounts of data, so additional studies are always useful. The purpose of this study was to produce estimates for the most important complications of tonsillectomy in children, namely readmission to hospital, surgical arrest of haemorrhage, blood transfusion and death, based on national, routinely collected data from Scotland, in order to inform decisionmaking in clinical practice.