1 Introduction The development of Statistical Process Control (SPC) in healthcare has been used to monitor outcomes in a range of settings [1-4], including infection control [5, 6], cardiac surgery [7-11], intensive care [12, 13] and interventional cardiology [14-17]. These tools are used to identify unanticipated trends and monitor the impact of targeted interventions to enhance patient care. To date, there have been limited applications to thoracic surgery.