Any Day Ok for Heart Bypass Surgery

Chelsea Parris
9/23/09
2:06pm

The article discusses how there's no bad time of the day, week or year to have elective coronary artery bypass surgery. The timing has no effect on the outcome. The Cleveland Clinic team conducted the study to determine whether working off-hours and long shifts might affect the performance of surgeons and other medical staff. Researchers started the study believing that timing was likely to influence outcome. If that were the case then hospitals could intervene with precautions to improve patient safety during high risk periods. The researchers also looked at the phases of the moon because it's widely believed that a full moon can increase the number of accidents and emergency room visits. The results suggested that the supposed effect of moon phase on medical complications is merely an urban legend. Coronary artery bypass graft surgery was studied because it's the most common heart surgery and because there are well-established protocols for the surgery. The study found that elective coronary artery bypass surgery can be scheduled anytime throughout the workday, any day of the week, and in any month of the year with equally good outcomes.

I found this article interesting because I never thought that researchers thought that the time of day a surgery was performed could affect the outcome. That seems kind of like a silly thought to me. I'm glad that all those urban legends and myths about the timing of a procedure affecting surgeries is being disproved because I feel like doctors may feel it is something to fall back on if their procedure went bad. They could say it was the timing of the day instead of their own fault, not that I think that would be a likely excuse.

http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/healthday/2009/09/23/any-day-ok-for-heart-bypass-surgery.html