Researches from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine found that in trauma centers, changes in patient volumes can affect the probability of injured patients living or dying.
As part of the study, published in Annals of Surgery, researchers analyzed the information of 840,000 seriously injured patients at 287 trauma centers between 2000 and 2012. The team of researchers "compared the expected death rate for each center if everything involving each trauma patient's care had gone perfectly to the center's actual death rate," according to the press release.
The study unveiled that for every 1 percent increase in patient volume, the patients at the center had a 73 percent greater chance of living. Each decrease in patient volume was associated with a two time greater likelihood that patients would die.
"So, the study suggests the negative impact of declining patient volume is significantly greater than that of the positive impact of increasing patient volume," said Jason Sperry, MD, study author and associate professor in the medical school's Surgery and Critical Care Medicine departments. "Granting unnecessary designation to a trauma center in a region that doesn't have the patient volume to support it not only hurts patient outcomes at that new center, but it will likely lead to a decline in patient outcomes at other nearby centers."
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