Children's Acute Surgical Abdomen Programme

To describe the type and quality of care being delivered to children (aged 1 - 16 years old) undergoing emergency abdominal surgery in the United Kingdom by measuring baseline compliance against evidence-based recommendations and identifying variations in care between individual hospitals.

The Children's Acute Surgical Abdomen Programme (CASAP) is a prospective national observational cohort study which aims to characterise the type and quality of care being delivered to children having emergency abdominal surgery. The investigators aim to recruit every U.K. hospital undertaking this type of surgery in children, and capture information on 5000 patients over the study period. The data collected will include information on patient risk factors, compliance with process quality indicators and the incidence and type of postoperative complications encountered. The data collected will be used to describe the current epidemiology of this patient group and to develop and internally validate a risk prediction tool for children undergoing emergency abdominal surgery. This tool be used to provide hospitals with their own risk-adjusted outcome measures and can subsequently be used to inform bedside decision-making. Patients will be followed up for 10 years through a data linkage process with National Health Service (NHS) Digital national databases.