https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/932407
News Release 23-Oct-2021
Researchers say hospitals need a better system to identify and manage surgical patients’ post-discharge complications; offer recommendations for improvement
Reports and Proceedings
American College of Surgeons
New study results suggest the national trend toward decreasing length of hospitalization after surgical procedures may come at the expense of an increasing proportion of complications occurring after patients leave the hospital. Findings from one of the few studies to explore the relationship between length of stay (LOS) and post-discharge complications for surgical patients were presented at the American College of Surgeons (ACS) virtual Clinical Congress 2021.
Hospitals have shortened inpatients’ hospital stays over the past two decades amid factors including an emphasis on outpatient treatment*, bed shortages, cost-cutting measures, and payers’ requirements. The new study found the median, or middle, LOS after an operation dropped by one-third, from three days in 2014 to two days in 2019.
Although the researchers discovered that the overall rate of postoperative complications declined 1 percent over the five-year study, they found a 12 percent increase in post-discharge complications across several common surgical specialities for more than 538,000 American patients.
Multiple serious complications, including infections and heart problems, had significantly higher rates of occurrence after discharge in 2019, when the average hospital stay was shorter versus 2014, said study co-investigator Ruojia Debbie Li, MD, MS. Dr. Li is a research fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, where the study took place.
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