Data are only as good as the system that collects them. It is crucial to have good healthcare data to draw robust and accurate conclusions, not only for individual clinician feedback but also to better inform patients. Venermo and Lees have shown the Swedish data collection for the SWEDVASC Registry to be on the whole highly accurate. It seems that most of the discrepancies found in external validation were a result of administrative errors, and the main issue in internal validation was one hospital not recording pre-operative risk factors of diabetes and smoking, which was attributed to a poor administrative culture. This is a robust database and the Swedish vascular surgeons and patients alike can be confident in its accuracy. The accuracy of clinical data recording has become of increasing importance in the UK. Since the NHS Commissioning Board’s publication “Everyone Counts: Planning for Patients 2013/14,” the UK government have been pushing for individual surgeon outcomes to be published, to better inform the public. This is following the lead of cardiac surgery, in which there are well-established index procedures and a culture of recording outcomes, to allow comparisons between colleagues and improve skills. In June 2013, the National Vascular Registry published consultant-level statistics on stroke and peri-operative mortality for carotid endarterectomy, and peri-operative mortality in elective infra-renal abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair. However, a surgeon is much more than just an individual, and here the argument lies. Should surgical outcomes be expressed at surgeon or at unit level? The latter would take into account the whole surgical episode, including multidisciplinary team decision-making, the anaesthetic team, high dependency and ward-based care. Concerns that the reporting of surgeon-level outcomes may lead to risk-adverse behaviour, with surgeons becoming reluctant to offer intervention in high-risk cases, may have been borne out in the UK outcome data reported in 2014. These data demonstrated a fall of 4.5% in the number of elective AAA repairs performed in the UK, between 2012 and 2013, the first year of surgeon-level outcome reporting. Another aspect to consider following the publication of surgeonspecific outcomes is the impact on training. The Association of Surgeons in Training (ASiT) in the UK has expressed concerns about this,