According to new research, patients may face a higher risk of death from colon surgery if their operation is performed at a teaching hospital.
The results of the new study are published in this month’s issue of the Archives of Surgery medical journal, and indicate that those who have colon surgery in a teaching hospital are hospitalized longer and face a slightly increased mortality rate. Teaching hospitals were often found to have performed the colon surgery procedures less often.
In the study, U.S. researchers from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, looked at more than 115,000 patients in 1,045 hospitals who had colon surgery from 2001 through 2005. They found that the mortality rate for colon surgery patients was 3.9% at teaching hospitals, compared to 3.7% at non-teaching hospitals. In addition, those who had the surgeries performed at teaching hospitals tended to remain hospitalized a half a day longer, on average, when the operations were done at teaching hospitals. The average length of stay, overall, was about 10 days.
Researchers say that, though small, the difference is important. They concluded that how the hospitals handle benign disease among the patients seems to be a “tipping point” that non-teaching hospitals seem to handle slightly better. Researchers said that the findings emphasize that diagnosis of a patient’s conditions before surgery should be considered as important as the procedure itself, particularly when determining where that surgery should be performed.