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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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How do elderly patients decide where to go for major surgery?
— telephone interview survey | | Author(s) | Lisa M Schwartz, Steven Woloshin, John D Birkmeyer |
| Journal title | British Medical Journal, vol 331, no 7520, 8 October 2005 |
| Pages | pp 821-824 |
| Source | http://www.bmj.com |
| Keywords | Surgery ; Referrals ; General practitioners ; Patients ; Consumer choice ; Social surveys ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | There is growing interest in providing patients with surgical performance data to help them select the highest quality surgeons and hospitals. However, publication of such performance data seems to have minimal impact. This article reports findings of a survey of 510 randomly selected Medicare beneficiaries in the US who had undergone an elective, high risk procedure about 3 years earlier. The response rate was 48% among eligible survivors, and 68% among those able to participate. The survey found that most had relied on the opinion of their referring physician in choosing to have surgery. Although few had looked for surgical performance data, they felt these data could influence their decision-making, some saying they would switch hospitals to one with lower mortality figures. Respondents did not want such data on their own: they wanted to learn about the best hospitals from their doctor, highlighting the importance of making this information accessible to referring physicians. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-051020204 A |
| Classmark | LKA: L5R: QT6: LF: WYC: 3F: 7T * |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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