Room in trauma center.
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers have found that changes in patient volumes can affect the probability of injured patients dying in trauma centers.
In the study, published in Annals of Surgery, researchers analyzed the cases of of 840,000 seriously injured patients at 287 trauma centers between 2000 and 2012, comparing “the expected death rate for each center if everything involving each trauma patient’s care had gone perfectly to the center’s actual death rate.”
For every 1 percent increase in volume, patients at the center had a 73 percent greater chance of living. Each decrease in patient volume was associated with a two-time greater likelihood that patients would die.
“So, the study suggests the negative impact of declining patient volume is significantly greater than that of the positive impact of increasing patient volume,” said Jason Sperry, M.D., study author and associate professor in the medical school’s Surgery and Critical Care Medicine departments. “Granting unnecessary designation to a trauma center in a region that doesn’t have the patient volume to support it not only hurts patient outcomes at that new center, but it will likely lead to a decline in patient outcomes at other nearby centers.”
To read the report, please hit this link.
