What Makes Better Hospitals Better?
I thought that the best places simply did a better job at controlling and minimizing risks — that they did a better job of preventing things from going wrong. But, to my surprise, they didn’t. Their complication rates after surgery were almost the same as others. Instead, what they proved to be really great at was rescuing people when they had a complication, preventing failures from becoming a catastrophe.
Scientists have given a new name to the deaths that occur in surgery after something goes wrong — whether it is an infection or some bizarre twist of the stomach. They call them a “failure to rescue.” More than anything, this is what distinguished the great from the mediocre. They didn’t fail less. They rescued more.
More from Atul Gawande in the New Yorker.
I have never heard this before. I wonder if this means that careful analysis of hospitals can identify ways of making them safe by reducing complications(in addition to increasing rescues)?
I think this is a surprising result.
Rescue rates for hospital ERs need to be published somewhere. On the internet. Where everyone can look them up.
What about rescue rates for health systems–say US medicine versus the NHS?
I agree with Devon, the identification of circumstances and actions behind the rescues could be useful to a lot of hospitals.