Failure to rescue in trauma: Early and late mortality in low- and high-performing trauma centers

alexandrossfakianakis shared this article with you from Inoreader Failure to rescue in trauma: Early and late mortality in low- and high-performing trauma centers via Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery - Current Issue BACKGROUND Failure to rescue (FTR) is defined as mortality following a complication. Failure to rescue has come under scrutiny as a quality metric to compare trauma centers. In contrast to elective surgery, trauma has an early period of high expected mortality because of injury sequelae rather than a complication. Here, we report FTR in early and late mortality using an externally validated trauma patient database, hypothesizing that centers with higher risk-adjusted mortality rates have higher risk-adjusted FTR rates. METHODS The study included 114,220 patients at 34 Levels I and II trauma centers in a statewide quality collaborative (2016–2020) with Injury Severity Score of ≥5. Emergency department deaths were excluded. Multivariate regression models were used to produce center-level adjusted rates for mortality and major complications. Centers were ranked on adjusted mortality rate and divided into quintiles. Early deaths (within 48 hours of presentation) and late deaths (after 48 hours) were analyzed. RESULTS Overall, 6.7% of patients had a major complication and 3.1% died. There was no difference in the mean risk-adjusted complication rate among the centers. Failure to rescue was significantly different across the quintiles (13.8% at the very low-mortality centers vs. 23.4% at the very-high-mortality centers, p View on Web

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