The Barmer Hospital Report 2020 has highlighted and analyzed patient safety and the quality of operations in hospitals and clinics in the state of Hesse. According to the health insurer, several deaths per year could be avoided if scheduled surgeries were performed by clinics that had the medical resources, the required staff, and also the necessary expertise, according to Martin Till as Barmer’s state managing director.
According to the study, 7,200 people die each year after surgeries in hospitals in the state of Hesse. Some could possibly be avoided according to the results of the analysis. After all, the frequency of a planned operation is closely related to the quality of care and patient safety. The data in the study comes from 2014 to 2017 and analyzes scheduled surgeries and non-emergency surgeries. 256 bariatric surgery operations were the focus of the analysts. Nineteen hospitals in Hesse, including six certified hospitals, were studied. After evaluating the results, it became apparent that there are risks when clinics offer special services that are performed in too small numbers („occasional surgeries“). There were hospitals awarded by the German Society for General and Visceral Surgery that had operated on 79 patients during the study period, while another hospital had treated only one patient.
Three outcome parameters were used to evaluate the quality of treatment. The focus was on death within 30 days after surgery, but also on the readmission rate within one year and so-called surgery-specific risks.
Till concludes that universal primary care is still desirable, but patients should look at the data from the various hospitals to find the most suitable, high-quality care because health insurers are not allowed to make recommendations. The patient basically decides in which hospital the procedure should be performed. However, health insurance companies can enable patients to deal with quality criteria in order to then act in a critical and self-determined manner.
All important information on this can be found on the Barmer website, in the Infothek.
Source: Faz