Surgical Outcomes Research
This is an area in which we have an already growing body of work examining what is required to increase the safety and reliability of surgical care. Our 1999 study of medical injury in 15,000 patients in 28 Utah and Colorado hospitals, established that avoidable, serious complications from surgery were a more frequent occurrence than appreciated. (Three percent of surgical patients were found to have experienced a medical injury. In all, half of the adverse events were avoidable.) In a further study involving injurious error, we were able to isolate a small group of factors that repeatedly contribute to surgical error. (The two most common factors, as it turns out, were inexperience and handoffs between personnel.) A $4 million AHRQ-funded project to collect and examine medical malpractice cases involving error in surgical care, obstetric care, diagnosis, and medication administration for patterns in how such errors occur is now underway. The first report to come out of this research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, revealed the factors that cause instruments and sponges to be forgotten in surgical patients. Ongoing work now underway in the center include: (1) research on colon cancer care across the country, including reasons for the wide variability in quality, for racial disparities, and for inadequate access to care for some; (2) development of an Apgar-like surgical safety score for operations; (3) development of a bar-coded surgical sponge system to prevent leaving them behind in patients; and (4) numerous clinical trials of methods to improve surgical outcomes, including the largest clinical trial of an intervention in peripheral vascular surgery ever done.
Send Feedback to: 
