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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

#91

Post by oblio »

mhh__ wrote: post #52

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?".

People are vain. People's vanity is so strong that they are willing to kill and maim others and even do insane things such as declaring wars.

Regarding your checklist, you should read about Semmelweiss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

It's crazy to think that entire generations of doctors retired and died arguing against washing your hands!

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

#92

Post by collyw »

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.

Some people do. I wouldn't say its the norm, but maybe one in five people do it in my anecdotal experience.

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

#93

Post by oblio »

onehp wrote: post #74
Reason077 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I don't understand why anybody would want to work on their birthday." Well, if you're lucky, your co-workers will chip in and buy a cake!

In all the work environments I've been in (UK) the culture is the opposite, as the birthday person you are expected to bring in cake.

Yeah. I've worked in multiple places in Europe and people except you to bring a cake or something.

They might pitch in and buy you a small present, in return.

But they definitely expect you to bring a cake or at least some sweets.

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

#94

Post by tomxor »

danpalmer wrote: post #88
mhh__ wrote: post #52

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?".

> It's perhaps worrying given how low-hanging some of these fruit are - i.e. "Do we have the right patient?" It turns out that while it's a good idea to check things this "low-hanging", the value is far larger than catching wrong patients, so don't worry too much! Much of the value comes from essentially disrupting routine with an opportunity to stop, and from creating a culture of speaking up. I think the NHS was th…

That's excellent! it never occurred to me it could have such a positive effect in a team situation. Empowering the supporting members is very insightful, they may be supporting but they are just as critical, they need to feel appreciation for the value they provide to stay sharp and motivated - I hope this can be applied to other contexts, thanks for sharing this.

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

#95

Post by fart32 »

wruza wrote: post #47

More than a decade ago we had to digitize some org’s patient cards into a database. After running few “test” queries against that dataset out of curiosity we found out that you’re less likely to be alcoholic-y if you live on 4-5 floor. The explanation I thought was that they hang out outside, but those who live higher have harder time to go home and prefer to not go. Building with 6+ stories usually have an elevator…

This might be different elsewhere, but here, the apartments on lower floors are typically rented and they're cheaper than those on higher floors. It's the case at the building I currently live in, although it's because on the lower floors, there are more apartments (smaller ones) than on the higher ones. Roof apartments are all sold out, not rented.

So, I could imagine, that the higher floors are occupied by more wealthy people, who might be less prone to alcoholism. This theory, however, doesn't check out for high rise prefab houses. But it could perhaps cause the deviation?

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

#96

Post by michalu »

So you have 365 days in the year when a surgery can take place but only one day when a surgeon can have birthday. You compare two samples of 364:1 ratio ... it wouldn't be suprising the tiny sample gets some crazy deviations. Yet you find nothing so you're forced to dig in deeper (well this kind of content does well on internet you better find something) and bam there's a deviation for elderly patients, now you've got something to get your work talked about ...

Funny the website that hosts the study* even displays an "altmetric" chart showing how many media talk about it, how many tweets etc. Well done science :)

*https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4381

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

#98

Post by riffraff »

mhh__ wrote: post #52

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?".

> i.e. "Do we have the right patient?".

sad anecdote: a friend of mine got surgery to remove a problematic mole on his back, and not only the surgeon got the wrong one, but even got upset with him when my friend mentioned something like "I thought it was further up my back".

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

#99

Post by moosinho »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #73

I’m going to guess (article won’t load for me) it is because the title should be “proportion of elderly deaths is 23% higher for surgery done on surgeons birthday” which might be a different thing if working on your birthday confounds with a certain type of surgery E.g. emergency surgery and being on call vs. elective surgery

Good point. That's probably also the case for surgeries on national holidays.

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

#100

Post by Ensorceled »

colonwqbang wrote: post #84
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…

This is a beautiful conjecture! The problem is amusingly circular. Even if you reject the conjure in parent comment, you will be tempted to reduce the number of birthday surgeries due to the increased mortality. This will mean that birthday surgeries are only done in even more desperate circumstances which of course will increase the risk. So mitigation of this problem will lead to the percentage increasing even more…

Yes, it does really mean you need to dig into actual causation or the law of unintended consequences will bite you in the ass.
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