In the largest ever study of hospital mortality rates published in the United Kingdom, "mortality rates for emergency patients 6 percent jump when newly qualified doctors begin working. In the health service Journal reports that "the traditional first day for NHS doctors is the first Wednesday in August. The researchers found that patients introduced in hospital in the week before were more likely to survive .... researchers could not find a definitive reason for the higher mortality rate, but the beginning of August said was known as a "period insecure" in hospitals because of the influx of new doctors "
Now, what can we conclude from this?
I might suggest that doctors with more experience are better than those with less experience? Needless to say, really.
So, how this can help the tourist physician who is trying to make a decision about which doctor or specialist overseas to choose for your operation? The problem of the choice of patients in healthcare is a choice of a surgeon abroad or a surgeon in the internal market is the "How do I know that he is good?"issue. In the United Kingdom, we're probably ahead of the game in enabling patients to make informed choices about treatment. The NHS is site has been renamed "NHS Choices" and in recent years there has been a drive to expose data on clinical outcomes and hospital and the surgeon performance and make it freely available to patients.
One of the strengths of the UK health care system (and one of its weaknesses!) are that the large proportion of health care is provided by a health service provider-the NHS. This means that data about processes, results, performance and patient satisfaction enough are normalized, allowing for valid comparisons to be made between a hospital and another, between one and another expert.
Let's imagine that I need a knee replacement. Under the NHS, I can choose to go to any hospital in the United Kingdom, not just my local hospital. But suppose I want to stay quite location. Here are some things that I can access on my local hospitals through the NHS Choices. For each "quality factor", highlighted the best result.
Impressed? Which hospital you choose? Or which hospital would rule out of the question? The table above just scratches the surface of the data that is now being made available to patients. I also could compare the quality of the food, service levels, and so on. And I can also start making comparisons between individual surgeons.
Where does that leave the tourist physician? The reality is that there are few countries where this type of comparative information is available for the patient. And the reality is that different health systems often measure things in different ways, so that the comparison of results data of a hospital in Thailand with the data from the result of a hospital in India can be very difficult.
Thus, the tourist doctor probably need to do some basic questions about the hospital and the expert. One is a key measure of "How do I know that he is good?" He has "how many times have you done this before?" "Practice makes perfect" as the recent study demonstrates. Choose a surgeon with experience in exactly what you need. If you're looking for a replacement of the knee, choose an orthopaedic surgeon that knee replacements and almost nothing else. Do not choose an orthopaedic surgeon general ", which makes" everything under the Sun "-knees, shoulders, hips, feet, etc.
And ask the guy "how many you have done this year?"
No comments:
Post a Comment