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However, the process has drawn criticism for failing to provide enough information or present the information in ways that can be easily accessed by patients.

Dr Jenny Neuburger, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and lead author of the report, which is published in the Lancet, said concentrating on the number of patients who died under a surgeons care could lead to other problems going unnoticed.

She said: "The danger is that low numbers will mean that chance factors overwhelm the influence of surgeon performance on the number of deaths.

"This could mask poor performance and lead to false complacency."

Instead the authors argue that the performance of surgeons should also include other patient outcomes, such as post-operative bleeding or the need for further surgery to correct mistakes.

Professor Jan van der Meulen, who led the study at the department of health services research and policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London, added that they were now working with some of the surgical societies to improve the data they are releasing.

He said: "If you take hip replacement surgery – mortality after that is extremely low, so it is impossible to compare surgeons using those outcomes.

"We may have to accept that for certain procedures, we cannot report at surgeon level because the numbers are too low."

While most of the first set of surgeon outcomes to be released focused on their patient mortality rates, some groups of surgeons had rates that were lower on average than 0.1 per cent.

The British Association of Endocrine and Thyroid Surgeons said they also included bleeding in patients as part of the surgeon outcomes in an attempt to provide a more detailed picture due to the low mortality rates.

Dave Chadwick, audit lead for the British Association of Endocrine and Thyroid Surgeons, said: "Mortality rate was incredibly low so we were trying to find some other softer end points that might still be relevant to quality of care."