Surgical patients who have experienced hospital harms are more likely to die from these adverse events than nonsurgical patients who experience the same harms, according to research presented at the 2014 meeting of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, as reported in General Surgery News.
Researchers analyzed data from more than 114,000 patients admitted to Detroit-based Henry Ford Health System from 2009 to 2011. They assessed 11 inpatient harms and found surgical patients had much higher mortality rates for these harms than nonsurgical patients.
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The overall mortality rate due to patient harm for surgical patients was 73.2 percent, compared to 37 percent for nonsurgical patients.
The three inpatient harms with the highest mortality rate for both surgical and nonsurgical patients were adverse events to medication (32 percent vs. 13.1 percent, respectively), renal failure (23.5 percent vs. 8.3 percent) and hypoglycemia (20 percent vs. 9.9 percent).
Additionally, mortality following procedural harm had the largest percentage disparity between surgical and nonsurgical patients, at 19.4 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively.
Researchers suggest surgical patients experience more pain, require more medications and undergo one of the "greatest physiological stress events in medicine," all of which may contribute to the higher mortality rates, according to the report.
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