In the “Doctor and Patient” column, Dr. Pauline W. Chen asked: when is the worst time to be a patient in the hospital? While people can’t often control when or why they need to be seen, there does exist a certain cut off point when patient safety is compromised at a hospital. But how do you identify it?
Analyzing the records of almost 40 hospitals and nearly 175,000 patients, researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor found that four factors — high hospital occupancy, weekend admissions, nurse staffing levels and the seasonal flu — can affect a patient’s risk of dying in the hospital. But while these factors universally influence in-hospital mortality, they can also interact with one another in such a way that each hospital ends up with its own particular threshold of risk.
The key is identifying not some universal cutoff point, but an individual hospital’s limits.
Unfortunately, there’s not much we, as patients, can do to identify that cutoff, but hospitals could theoretically work with each other to help alleviate the threshold of occupancy and staffing.
The full thing at Well.
