With two major exceptions, overlapping surgeries are safe overall

Tuesday, February 26, 2019 - 11:30 in Health & Medicine

A surgeon sometimes moves from one operation to the next before the first one is completed, leaving junior surgeons, residents, and physician assistants to complete the noncritical portions of the procedure. The practice happens tens of thousands of times a year in U.S. hospitals, but are such overlapping operations safe? For the most part they are, but with two important exceptions, according to research by investigators at Harvard Medical School and Stanford University published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and thought to be one of the most comprehensive analyses on the subject to date. The results, based on a comparison of outcomes from more than 60,000 operations, reveal that overall, overlapping surgeries do not increase the risk for postsurgical complications or patient death in the immediate aftermath of the procedure. However, there were two important exceptions. Patients deemed to be at high risk — those with a relatively high predicted...

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