Bigger hospitals give healthier heart rates
The size of a hospital is important for patients hoping to survive heart disease, with a new study showing that the bigger the treating hospital, the lower the death rates.
Teaching hospitals, big regional hospitals, and hospitals that billed more of their treatments to health funds were found in a University of Melbourne study – which drew on five years of data on more than 400,000 treatments for heart problems at 146 hospitals – to perform better than their peers.
Dr Jongsay Yong, of the University’s Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, said the data analysis had hospital size and quality of care related.
“The bigger sized hospitals tend to provide higher quality care in terms of mortality”.
Dr Yong said that that bigger hospitals could build up more expertise, capacity, and better technology than smaller hospitals, giving their patients a potentially life saving advantage.
“In the urban areas you may be able to have different hospitals specialising in different types of diseases or conditions”.
The study found that although there were higher survival rates in hospitals with larger proportions of privately billed patients it was difficult to establish reasons.
It could be because privately insured patients were richer and possibly healthier, or because they had access to newer drugs, were in private hospitals offering more intensive care, or because one specialist treated them in and out of hospital.
