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Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

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Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#151

Post by jlebar »

Ensorceled wrote: post #79

Anecdotally, my father-in-law was chief of staff for a small city hospital and they had a rule about not scheduling afternoon surgeries on important days like anniversaries, birthdays, etc. Basically, if the surgery started going long, you didn't want the surgeon worrying about missing their spouses birthday, birthday with their kids or an anniversary. It actually wasn't that many surgeries delayed, as the surgeon ju…

> If this is fairly standard practice, then an afternoon birthday surgery would be an emergency situation and, hence, more deadly.

TFA says they're only counting emergency surgeries, to avoid exactly this bias.

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#152

Post by mekkkkkk »

jrh206 wrote: post #144
daniellarusso wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A surgeon seems more fungible than a developer, to me. All sorts of standards, compliance, and licensing requirements.

Nobody's making any points about developers My gut instinct is that this is incorrect, too, but I don't know enough about surgery to make a compelling argument. I'd back myself to pick up Ruby (a language I've never touched before) and be productive, more than I'd trust a surgeon who only has experience with heart surgery to operate on my brain. Maybe that's ignorant of me.

Even if a Ruby bug would mean death?

EDIT: I take this back. I missed the point of the argument.

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#155

Post by ceejayoz »

mekkkkkk wrote: post #152
jrh206 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody's making any points about developers My gut instinct is that this is incorrect, too, but I don't know enough about surgery to make a compelling argument. I'd back myself to pick up Ruby (a language I've never touched before) and be productive, more than I'd trust a surgeon who only has experience with heart surgery to operate on my brain. Maybe that's ignorant of me.

Even if a Ruby bug would mean death? EDIT: I take this back. I missed the point of the argument.

That'd change the risks, sure.

I don't think that's the scenario @jrh206 was talking about, though. Most code written in Ruby doesn't have the sort of immediate risk to life or limb surgeries do.

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#157

Post by dangus »

A reminder about statistical math:

If something is 23% more likely to happen, you have to look at the original probability to get a handle on whether that increase is serious.

For example, if something has a 5% chance of happening, and it’s now 23% more likely, that means it now has a 6.15% chance of happening.

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#158

Post by PeterisP »

daniellarusso wrote: post #137
Galanwe wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think surgeons are fongible assets. There is a lot of planning and study taking place before a complex operation. Not to mention most surgeons have specialties.

A surgeon seems more fungible than a developer, to me. All sorts of standards, compliance, and licensing requirements.

For non-emergency surgeries it's often a long-term relationship where the same doctor who has seen the patient a few times would be the one operating - so if that particular surgeon isn't available for whatever reason, the planned operation would be rescheduled to a different date with the same doctor, not to a different doctor in the same day.

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#159

Post by andrewla »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #19
voxl wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we need an opposite saying for sentiments like this to the age old "correlation does not equal causation", something like "correlation does not mean automatically dismiss"

The comment you replied to has nothing to do with "correlation does not equal causation". The point was that fishing for results, by trying everything, is guaranteed to find something. So if, in a study like this, they looked at differences in morality rate between: 1) men and women, 2) younger and older people, 3) younger and older surgeons, 4) surgeries in summer vs winter 4) surgeries in morning vs evening 5) etc…

The only way to make the results believable is if they pre-registered the study based on a proposed mechanism of action, and then validated the results. Otherwise we can never know how many different attempts at crafting signal from the noise were attempted.

Re: Elderly patients 23% more likely to die if surgery is on the surgeon’s birthday

#160

Post by barry-cotter »

habosa wrote: post #53
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #16

> They also found that some surgeons did not work on their birthdays Is this partially that better/more experienced/senior/more affluent doctors are taking their birthday off, hence people getting more junior doctors? It would be interesting to see how many more people die on a particular surgeons birthday compared with the rest of their year, rather than the birthday of the surgeon a patient gets.

I remember a previous study showing that junior doctors were actually associated with better results since they were more recently trained and had less ingrained habits/biases. Don't know if it applied to surgery though.

I would be surprised if it did. I believe the reduction in doctors’ overtime was a wash for parent safety as more shift handoffs and less sleep deprivation more or less canceled except in surgery where it increased mistakes.
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