Factors affecting mortality rates in hospitals

While it’s a given that life has a 100 percent mortality rate, the time and occurrence of death greatly vary.  Inside hospitals, there are so many ways doctors can treat symptoms and prevent deaths.  Yet there are multiple factors affecting mortality rates inside healthcare institutions—here are some of them, according to recent studies:

Palliative care

This is deemed a key factor in preventing admissions to the hospital at the patient’s end of life.  Last admission can be avoided when there’s proper planning and dialogue with the patient as well as the family and caregivers.  Palliative care should be readily accessed by everyone with serious illness or facing difficult health care choices.

Surprise quality inspections

Some studies indicate that clinicians may be at their best behavior when someone is watching—hospital inspectors, that is.  According to an article published on JAMA Internal Medicine last year, 30-day patient mortality rates notably dropped in hospitals that underwent surprise quality inspections conducted by The Joint Commission.  When inspectors came to visit major teaching hospitals for unannounced on-site surveillance, patient deaths within 30 days of discharge dropped from an average of 7.21 percent to 7.03 percent.

Hospital facilities

Another study published in May 2017 suggested that major U.S. teaching hospitals, which are often considered more expensive than their competitors, may maintain a quality advantage.  Older adults treated at those facilities were less likely to die in the weeks and months after their discharge, compared to patients admitted to “non-teaching” or community hospitals, according to the study that involves over 21 million hospitalizations of Medicare beneficiaries from 2012 to 2014.  It also found that if death rates at non-teaching hospitals were similar to those, there would be about 58,000 fewer deaths annually among patients. 

Dr. Roger Olade is a specialist in internal and emergency medicine. He is the Chief Executive Officer at Providence Training Institute, LLC. Read more about the medical field on this site.