Patients whose hip surgeries were performed by surgeons overseeing two operations at once were almost twice as likely to suffer serious complications as those whose doctors focused on one patient at a time. It’s the first study (analyzing outcomes up to a year after the surgeries, as opposed to only weeks) to show that overlapping surgery can pose health risks. The study of over 90,000 hip operations at 75 hospitals in Ontario found the risk of complications in operations on broken hips rose 7% for every 10 minutes that operations overlapped. The reports underlines the risks and underscores the need for surgeons to inform patients they’ll be overlapping cases before patients consent to surgery.
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Commentary: Overlapping surgery - perspectives from the other side of the table - JAMA Network
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