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

psychnewsdaily.com

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

#51

Post by tokai »

sixhobbits wrote: post #15
im3w1l wrote: post #5

> Research on judges has yielded similar results. It has found, for example, that external factors as diverse as outdoor temperatures and sports results can influence judges’ decisions. When I hear of these funky effects I always wonder how they relate to AI. Presumably this is somehow related to some kind of lossy compression of the state of the world, maybe similar to principal components[0]? Where the "I feel grum…

Also interesting is "Impossibly Hungry Judges". Many of these correlation effects are paradoxically so strong that they they _cannot_ be the true explanation. [0] http://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges

"The phenomenon of favorable decisions peaking after a meal break is likely an artifact of the order of case presentation. It is not evidence that meal breaks affect the boards’ decisions."

https://www.pnas.org/content/108/42/E833.full

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

#52

Post by mhh__ »

https://www.england.nhs.uk/2019/01/surgical-safety-checklist...

Getting surgeons to adopt the kind of "It's obvious but point and speak or you're fired"-style checklists a la operating an aircraft has reduced complications (from the minor to deaths) by several percent in the NHS. It's perhaps worrying given how low-hanging some of these fruit are - i.e. "Do we have the right patient?".

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

#53

Post by habosa »

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.

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #13

> The study, which appears today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), looked at 980,876 procedures performed in US hospitals by 47,489 surgeons. Of those procedures, 2,064 (0.2%) took place on a surgeon’s birthday. So, only a fraction of the surgeons performed operation on their birthdays. Would be interesting to compare the outcomes using the same surgeon group: surgeries on birthday vs same-surgeon surgeries on ot…

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by boomboomsubban »

svrtknst wrote: post #50
bottled_poe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those that are working on their birthday also more likely to do so under emergency situations...

Are they? Sounds odd that the norm would be for people to take birthdays off.

I may be making this up, but aren't there some rather strict rules about surgeons and alcohol? It may make them more likely to just take the day off.

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

#56

Post by fogihujy »

englishrookie wrote: post #38
spiderfarmer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never took the day off on my birthday, but a lot of people do. So it might also make sense to ask why these surgeons are operating on their birthdays. Did they take the day off and went back to perform surgery on a critical patient? Are they overworked? Etc.

Is that a thing in the US, taking a day off on your birthday? To the best of my knowledge, nobody does that in Europe - certainly not in the Netherlands.

It does happen in Europe too; It's more of a personal preference than an actual thing, though.

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

#57

Post by mschuster91 »

englishrookie wrote: post #38
spiderfarmer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never took the day off on my birthday, but a lot of people do. So it might also make sense to ask why these surgeons are operating on their birthdays. Did they take the day off and went back to perform surgery on a critical patient? Are they overworked? Etc.

Is that a thing in the US, taking a day off on your birthday? To the best of my knowledge, nobody does that in Europe - certainly not in the Netherlands.

Depends on where in Europe you are and how much the people you know value getting wasted or stoned. Personally, I prefer taking off at birthday + 1 day after.

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

#58

Post by steerablesafe »

svrtknst wrote: post #50
bottled_poe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those that are working on their birthday also more likely to do so under emergency situations...

Are they? Sounds odd that the norm would be for people to take birthdays off.

It doesn't have to be norm, only statistically significant.

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

#59

Post by markus92 »

englishrookie wrote: post #38
spiderfarmer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never took the day off on my birthday, but a lot of people do. So it might also make sense to ask why these surgeons are operating on their birthdays. Did they take the day off and went back to perform surgery on a critical patient? Are they overworked? Etc.

Is that a thing in the US, taking a day off on your birthday? To the best of my knowledge, nobody does that in Europe - certainly not in the Netherlands.

Dutchie here, most of my colleagues do.

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

#60

Post by albertgoeswoof »

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 suppose what you want is someone with enough experience, but who hasn't been out of medical school for too long. Probably 7-10 years of experience would be the sweet spot.

I wonder if this applies to other domains as well.

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