Chief Residents Can Safely Operate on Older and Frail Patients.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Older age and frailty increase the risk of poor recovery after surgery. We hypothesized that general surgery operations performed by supervised chief residents, as opposed to attending physicians, would still be safe for these vulnerable patients.

Materials and methods

We used the Veterans Affairs Surgical Quality Improvement Program database to identify 114,525 patients age 65+ y, including 18,030 patients age 80+ y and 47,555 categorized as frail, who had a general surgery procedure from 1999 to 2019 that was performed by an attending physician or by a supervised chief resident. Frailty was defined by a Risk Analysis Index score ≥30. We used inverse probability weighting on the propensity score to compare morbidity and mortality between operations performed by

SUBMITTER: Meier J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10183228 | biostudies-literature | 2023 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature