Essay On Hospital Mortality

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It is traditional of hospitals to be places where patients tend to have treatment modalities to cure their ailments, yet, a hospital can be the very place where patients meet their ends on the way they took to avoid them. In the UK, about 60% of deaths occur intra-hospital 1. In the US, The number of inpatient hospital deaths decreased 8% from 776,000 in 2000 to 715,000 in 2010 2. According to a CDC’s report, in the United State, the number of inpatient hospital deaths was 8% (about 715,000) in 2010 . Among them, patients with certain fist-listed diagnoses had relatively higher hospital death rates (70% in 2010). Inpatients who died in the hospital stayed an average of 7.9 days in 2010, compared with an average of 4.8 days for all inpatients 3. Patients admitted to the ICU suffer from critical illness or injuries are at high risk of dying. ICU mortality rates differ widely depending on the underlying disease process, with overall death rates of 12.4%. Mortality is as low as 5% for patients admitted following elective surgery, and as high as 25% for patients with respiratory diseases. The risk of death can be…show more content…
Florence Nightingale, an English social reformer, statistician, and the founder of modern nursing, was the first to raise the issue of comparing mortality rates between hospitals 6. Yet her efforts were criticized later because they were only focused on hospital-related and medical staff-related variables, and lacked a parallel attention to patient-related factors that were very likely to influence mortality. William Augustus Guy, an English physician and medical statistician, was the first to raise the issue of “case mix”, or patient related factors affecting the severity of disease on admission, and thus affecting mortality. His views led to the idea of risk adjustment for mortality by age, sex, and other demographic and disease related variables

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