The authors report their analysis of the highest quality research over the past decade examining the effects of health insurance on health and conclude that insurance coverage increases access to ...care and improves health outcomes.
Covid-19 vaccination poses challenges that complicate the traditional reliance on primary care delivery. Mass-vaccination sites offer a logical solution, and early adopters have yielded several ...lessons that are critical to achieving population-wide vaccination.
To estimate global surgical volume in 2012 and compare it with estimates from 2004.
For the 194 Member States of the World Health Organization, we searched PubMed for studies and contacted key ...informants for reports on surgical volumes between 2005 and 2012. We obtained data on population and total health expenditure per capita for 2012 and categorized Member States as very-low, low, middle and high expenditure. Data on caesarean delivery were obtained from validated statistical reports. For Member States without recorded surgical data, we estimated volumes by multiple imputation using data on total health expenditure. We estimated caesarean deliveries as a proportion of all surgery.
We identified 66 Member States reporting surgical data. We estimated that 312.9 million operations (95% confidence interval, CI: 266.2-359.5) took place in 2012, an increase from the 2004 estimate of 226.4 million operations. Only 6.3% (95% CI: 1.7-22.9) and 23.1% (95% CI: 14.8-36.7) of operations took place in very-low- and low-expenditure Member States representing 36.8% (2573 million people) and 34.2% (2393 million people) of the global population of 7001 million people, respectively. Caesarean deliveries comprised 29.6% (5.8/19.6 million operations; 95% CI: 9.7-91.7) of the total surgical volume in very-low-expenditure Member States, but only 2.7% (5.1/187.0 million operations; 95% CI: 2.2-3.4) in high-expenditure Member States.
Surgical volume is large and growing, with caesarean delivery comprising nearly a third of operations in most resource-poor settings. Nonetheless, there remains disparity in the provision of surgical services globally.
IMPORTANCE: Based on older analyses, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that cesarean delivery rates should not exceed 10 to 15 per 100 live births to optimize maternal and neonatal ...outcomes. OBJECTIVES: To estimate the contemporary relationship between national levels of cesarean delivery and maternal and neonatal mortality. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: Cross-sectional, ecological study estimating annual cesarean delivery rates from data collected during 2005 to 2012 for all 194 WHO member states. The year of analysis was 2012. Cesarean delivery rates were available for 54 countries for 2012. For the 118 countries for which 2012 data were not available, the 2012 cesarean delivery rate was imputed from other years. For the 22 countries for which no cesarean rate data were available, the rate was imputed from total health expenditure per capita, fertility rate, life expectancy, percent of urban population, and geographic region. EXPOSURES: Cesarean delivery rate. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: The relationship between population-level cesarean delivery rate and maternal mortality ratios (maternal death from pregnancy related causes during pregnancy or up to 42 days postpartum per 100 000 live births) or neonatal mortality rates (neonatal mortality before age 28 days per 1000 live births). RESULTS: The estimated number of cesarean deliveries in 2012 was 22.9 million (95% CI, 22.5 million to 23.2 million). At a country-level, cesarean delivery rate estimates up to 19.1 per 100 live births (95% CI, 16.3 to 21.9) and 19.4 per 100 live births (95% CI, 18.6 to 20.3) were inversely correlated with maternal mortality ratio (adjusted slope coefficient, −10.1; 95% CI, −16.8 to −3.4; P = .003) and neonatal mortality rate (adjusted slope coefficient, −0.8; 95% CI, −1.1 to −0.5; P < .001), respectively (adjusted for total health expenditure per capita, population, percent of urban population, fertility rate, and region). Higher cesarean delivery rates were not correlated with maternal or neonatal mortality at a country level. A sensitivity analysis including only 76 countries with the highest-quality cesarean delivery rate information had a similar result: cesarean delivery rates greater than 6.9 to 20.1 per 100 live births were inversely correlated with the maternal mortality ratio (slope coefficient, −21.3; 95% CI, −32.2 to −10.5, P < .001). Cesarean delivery rates of 12.6 to 24.0 per 100 live births were inversely correlated with neonatal mortality (slope coefficient, −1.4; 95% CI, −2.3 to −0.4; P = .004). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: National cesarean delivery rates of up to approximately 19 per 100 live births were associated with lower maternal or neonatal mortality among WHO member states. Previously recommended national target rates for cesarean deliveries may be too low.
Summary Background Although the extent of hospital and intensive-care use at the end of life is well known, patterns of surgical care during this period are poorly understood. We examined national ...patterns of surgical care in the USA among elderly fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries in their last year of life. Methods We did a retrospective cohort study of elderly beneficiaries of fee-for-service Medicare in the USA, aged 65 years or older, who died in 2008. We identified claims for inpatient surgical procedures in the year before death and examined the relation between receipt of an inpatient procedure and both age and geographical region. We calculated an end-of-life surgical intensity (EOLSI) score for each hospital referral region defined as proportion of decedents who underwent a surgical procedure during the year before their death, adjusted for age, sex, race, and income. We compared patient characteristics with Rao-Scott χ2 tests, resource use with generalised estimating equations, regional differences with generalised estimating equations Wald tests, and end-of-life surgical intensity scores with Spearman's partial-rank-order correlation coefficients. Findings Of 1 802 029 elderly beneficiaries of fee-for-service Medicare who died in 2008, 31·9% (95% CI 31·9–32·0; 575 596 of 1 802 029) underwent an inpatient surgical procedure during the year before death, 18·3% (18·2–18·4; 329 771 of 1 802 029) underwent a procedure in their last month of life, and 8·0% (8·0–8·1; 144 162 of 1 802 029) underwent a procedure during their last week of life. Between the ages of 80 and 90 years, the percentage of decedents undergoing a surgical procedure in the last year of life decreased by 33% (35·3% 95% CI 34·7–35·9; 8858 of 25 094 to 23·6% 22·9–24·3; 3340 of 14 152). EOLSI score in the highest intensity region (Munster, IN) was 34·4 (95% CI 33·7–35·1) and in the lowest intensity region (Honolulu, HI) was 11·5 (11·3–11·7). Regions with a high number of hospital beds per head had high end-of-life surgical intensity (r=0·37, 95% CI 0·27–0·46; p<0·0001), as did regions with high total Medicare spending (r=0·50, 0·41–0·58; p<0·0001). Interpretation Many elderly people in the USA undergo surgery in the year before their death. The rate at which they undergo surgery varies substantially with age and region and might suggest discretion in health-care providers' decisions to intervene surgically at the end of life. Funding None.
In this study, the authors designed checklists to guide care during operating-room crises and evaluated them in a simulated operating room. The availability of checklists improved adherence to best ...practices by operating-room teams during simulations of surgical crises.
Operating-room crises (e.g., massive hemorrhage and cardiac arrest) are high-risk, stressful events that require rapid and coordinated care in a time-critical setting. The reported incidence may be rare for an individual practitioner,
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but the aggregate incidence for a hospital with 10,000 operations a year is estimated to be approximately 145 such events annually.
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These are situations in which the way the team cares for a patient will make the difference between life and death. Failure to effectively manage life-threatening complications in surgical patients has been recognized as the largest source of variation in surgical mortality among hospitals.
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Small-scale studies . . .
Concerns about reducing the rate of growth of health expenditures have reignited interest in medical liability reforms and their potential to save money by reducing the practice of defensive ...medicine. It is not easy to estimate the costs of the medical liability system, however. This article identifies the various components of liability system costs, generates national estimates for each component, and discusses the level of evidence available to support the estimates. Overall annual medical liability system costs, including defensive medicine, are estimated to be $55.6 billion in 2008 dollars, or 2.4 percent of total health care spending.
This analysis of Medicare data suggests that 13% of patients are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days after major surgery. Readmission rates vary across hospitals and correlate with surgical ...volume and surgical mortality, two measures of surgical quality.
Reducing hospital-readmission rates is a priority for both policymakers and clinical leaders. The focus on readmissions has been driven by a belief that reducing the frequency with which patients return to the hospital can both improve care and lower costs. To date, much of the focus has been on readmissions after hospitalization for medical conditions, in which discharge planning and care coordination are often suboptimal.
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) plans to include surgical procedures as it expands its readmissions penalty program.
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Using medical-readmission rates as a measure of hospital quality is controversial. Although hospitals vary . . .
IMPORTANCE: High-quality conversations between clinicians and seriously ill patients about values and goals are associated with improved outcomes but occur infrequently. OBJECTIVE: To examine ...feasibility, acceptability, and effect of a communication quality-improvement intervention (Serious Illness Care Program) on patient outcomes. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: A cluster randomized clinical trial of the Serious Illness Care Program in an outpatient oncology setting was conducted. Patients with advanced cancer (n = 278) and oncology clinicians (n = 91) participated between September 1, 2012, and June 30, 2016. Data analysis was performed from September 1, 2016, to December 27, 2018. All analyses were conducted based on intention to treat. INTERVENTIONS: Tools, training, and system changes. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: The coprimary outcomes included goal-concordant care (Life Priorities) and peacefulness (Peace, Equanimity, and Acceptance in the Cancer Experience questionnaire) at the end of life. Secondary outcomes included therapeutic alliance (Human Connection Scale), anxiety (Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7 scale), depression (Patient Health Questionnaire 9), and survival. Uptake and effectiveness of clinician training, clinician use of the conversation tool, and conversation duration were evaluated. RESULTS: Data from 91 clinicians in 41 clusters (72.9% participation; intervention, n = 48; control, n = 43; 52 57.1% women) and 278 patients (45.8% participation; intervention, n = 134; control, n = 144; 148 53.2% women) were analyzed. Forty-seven clinicians (97.9%) rated the training as effective (mean SD score, 4.3 0.7 of 5.0 possible); of 39 who received a reminder, 34 (87.2%) completed at least 1 conversation (median duration, 19 minutes; range, 5-70). Peacefulness, therapeutic alliance, anxiety, and depression did not differ at baseline. The coprimary outcomes were evaluated in 64 patients; no significant differences were found between the intervention and control groups. However, the trial demonstrated significant reductions in the proportion of patients with moderate to severe anxiety (10.2% vs 5.0%; P = .05) and depression symptoms (20.8% vs 10.6%; P = .04) in the intervention group at 14 weeks after baseline. Anxiety reduction was sustained at 24 weeks (10.4% vs 4.2%; P = .02), but depression reduction was not sustained (17.8% vs 12.5%; P = .31). Survival and therapeutic alliance did not differ between groups. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: The results of this cluster randomized clinical trial were null with respect to the coprimary outcomes of goal-concordant care and peacefulness at the end of life. Methodologic challenges for the primary outcomes, including measure selection and sample size, limit the conclusions that can be drawn from the study. However, the significant reductions in anxiety and depression in the intervention group are clinically meaningful and require further study. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01786811
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