What Sort of Analysis do I require?

[lee_alkureishi]

Hi all,

I'm new to data analysis and statistics in general, and was looking for advice on what sort of analysis I require (I'm currently working in excel/SPSS):

My population is made up of 200 cases (each representing a surgical operation). More than one operation may have been carried out on the same patient (a patient may have had between 1 and 10 operations).

I want to determine the effect of smoking as a risk factor for requiring a further operation. For each operation, I have data on the "time to next event", and whether that "event" was another operation or the study end-date.

I had planned to use Kaplan-Meier survival analysis, but was told recently that this wouldn't be correct (due to the fact that several of the operations may have been in a single patient, leading to confounding factors...).

Is there another type of analysis I can carry out, that will give me what I need? Or, can anyone point me to a more appropriate forum where I can post this query?

Thanks in advance,

Leeko