Italian hospitals must reduce duplication of surgical units to improve results

Michael Day

Fonte: British Medical Journal

Italy must encourage greater specialisation in its hospitals’ surgical units, along the lines of US and UK institutions, to cut death rates, the country’s surgeons were told last week.

Carlo Staudacher, an surgeon at the Istituto Scientifico Ospedale San Raffaele in Milan, told the national congress of the Italian Society of Surgery that in hospitals throughout the country surgical teams were carrying out major procedures that they were not best qualified to do.

The problem, he said, was that many hospitals had three or four surgical units performing the same procedures, often with radically different success rates.

“As a result of these duplicate units in the same hospital, excellence escapes them—and so do good results,” he said.

“Why is this happening? How can it be allowed to happen? No one has even asked these questions—or asked the competing surgical teams or management of hospitals to justify what’s going on,” he . . . [Full text of this article]

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