New Report Indicates Hospitals With More Procedures Have Better Patient Safety

Hospitals with larger volumes of procedures have better patient safety. A new study in the journal Health Services Research found that hospital volume is inversely related to preventable adverse events."That means that the more procedures these hospitals were performing, the lower rates they would have of adverse events," said lead author Tina Hernandez-Boussard in a Health Behavior News Service article.

Researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine examined the rates of nine different adverse events in hospitalized patients after three surgical procedures. In almost every case, hospitals with higher surgical volume--more than 28 procedures per year for abdominal aortic aneurysm, more than 245 for heart bypass surgery, and more than 89 for gastric bypass surgery--had fewer adverse events than hospitals with low volumes of surgery.
The findings suggest that hospitals below a certain surgical volume shouldn't be doing the procedure, Dr. David Bates, executive director of the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice and chief of general internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, told Health Behavior News.

Read more: More hospital procedures mean better patient safety - FierceHealthcare http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/story/more-procedures-mean-better-safety/2011-09-01#ixzz1Wnj2Bbc6