Keeping life in our patients’ years toward the end of our patients’ lives

Keeping life in our patients’ years toward the end of our patients’ lives
Annals of Surgery; by Courtney Collins, Ronnie A Rosenthal; 5/24
As surgeons we are trained, some may say indoctrinated, to care about traditional benchmarks like wound infections, the need for critical care, 30-day readmissions, and (of course) mortality. These factors are obsessively collected and analyzed looking for any and all possible opportunities to move the needle of surgical quality by even the tiniest amount (as long as it is statistically significant). To be sure, this approach has yielded vast improvements in how we care for our patients and correspondingly, surgical outcomes have continued to improve over time. This intriguing analysis by Keney et al asks us to consider that in our pursuit of perfection by standard definitions, we may be missing something even more critical: what “good” looks like from the patient’s point of view.