DoSurgeons Have More Difficulties in the Hospital Care of Non-surgery Patients Than With Surgery Patients?

Abstract

Objective: A variable percentage of patients admitted to surgical departments are not operated on for several reasons. Our goal is to check if surgeons have more problems in caring for non-operated hospitalized patients than operated ones.

Material and methods: We included all patients aged ≥ 14 years discharged in 2010 from General Surgery, Gynaecology, Urology, and Otolaryngology. The main variables were the length of stay, mortality, readmissions, and number of consultations/referrals requested to medical services. Secondary variables were age, sex, number of emergency admissions, total number of diagnoses, and the Charlson comorbidity index (ICh).

Results: Between 8.7% and 22.8% of patients admitted to these surgical departments are not operated on. The non-operated patients had a significantly higher stay, mortality, readmissions and consultations/referrals requests than operated ones, with significantly higher age (except Urology), number of diagnoses, emergency admissions and ICh (except Urology).

Conclusions: Patients admitted to surgical departments and are not operated on have higher mortality, readmissions and consultation/referrals requests than those operated on, which may be due to their greater medical complexity and urgency of admission. This suggests a greater difficulty in their care by surgeons.

Keywords: Atención perioperatoria; Departamento de Cirugía; Inpatients; Internal Medicine; Medicina Interna; Pacientes ingresados; Perioperative care; Referral and consultation; Remisión y consulta; Surgery Department.