Original articleAdult cardiacFailure-to-Rescue Rate as a Measure of Quality of Care in a Cardiac Surgery Recovery Unit: A Five-Year Study
Section snippets
Patients and Methods
Study approval and a waiver of the need for individual patient consent was granted by the Research Ethics Board of Western University.
Our cardiac surgery recovery unit was physically consolidated as a dedicated, 16-bed unit in April 2005 [14]. It is staffed by a consultant group that includes cardiac surgeons, cardiac anesthesiologists, and critical care physicians. In-house night call is provided by midlevel or senior postgraduate trainees in cardiac anesthesiology, critical care, and cardiac
Results
Data on 4,978 consecutive patients were analyzed. The overall mortality, complication, and FTR rates were 180 (3.6%), 834 (16.8%), and 165 of 834 (19.8%), respectively. The baseline characteristics of the 834 patients with postoperative complications who were included in our FTR analyses are displayed in Table 1. Table 2 shows the overall FTR rates for the ten major complications. New renal failure requiring dialysis and septicemia were associated with the highest FTR rates, which were both
Comment
This study analyzed the FTR during a 5-year period in a dedicated cardiac surgery recovery unit. Our principal motivation was to evaluate the performance of our unit and to use the FTR rate as a guide for future quality improvement efforts. We also wished to explore the incremental value of FTR as a quality assurance measure. The overall FTR did not change significantly during the 5-year study period (p = 0.279), with an average rate of 19.8% (95% confidence interval, 17.1% to 22.7%). Our data
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