1. |
- Librero, Julian, et al.
(author)
-
Timing of surgery for hip fracture and in-hospital mortality: a retrospective population-based cohort study in the Spanish National Health System
- 2012
-
In: BMC Health Services Research. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1472-6963. ; 12:15
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Background: While the benefits or otherwise of early hip fracture repair is a long-running controversy with studies showing contradictory results, this practice is being adopted as a quality indicator in several health care organizations. The aim of this study is to analyze the association between early hip fracture repair and in-hospital mortality in elderly people attending public hospitals in the Spanish National Health System and, additionally, to explore factors associated with the decision to perform early hip fracture repair. Methods: A cohort of 56,500 patients of 60-years-old and over, hospitalized for hip fracture during the period 2002 to 2005 in all the public hospitals in 8 Spanish regions, were followed up using administrative databases to identify the time to surgical repair and in-hospital mortality. We used a multivariate logistic regression model to analyze the relationship between the timing of surgery (< 2 days from admission) and in-hospital mortality, controlling for several confounding factors. Results: Early surgery was performed on 25% of the patients. In the unadjusted analysis early surgery showed an absolute difference in risk of mortality of 0.57 (from 4.42% to 3.85%). However, patients undergoing delayed surgery were older and had higher comorbidity and severity of illness. Timeliness for surgery was not found to be related to in-hospital mortality once confounding factors such as age, sex, chronic comorbidities as well as the severity of illness were controlled for in the multivariate analysis. Conclusions: Older age, male gender, higher chronic comorbidity and higher severity measured by the Risk Mortality Index were associated with higher mortality, but the time to surgery was not.
|
|