May 27, 2016 – Regional Team

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Anchor lead:  How can harms for emergency surgeries be reduced? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Seven operations account for the majority of complications, costs and death associated with emergency surgery, a recent study found. Robert Higgins, director of surgery at Johns Hopkins, says a couple of approaches might be taken to help reduce that toll.

Higgins: We might need to have specialized teams, who specialize in acute care surgery.  They are skilled at it, they are prepared to deal with unusual circumstances on a short notice. Secondarily, it means we should focus our attention, if we are going to change the morbidity and mortality in these seven procedures, on those specific areas at risk for bad outcomes.  We should really dive deeply into what makes those operations riskier and potentially figure out ways to be more successful.  :30

Higgins says identifying surgical teams that have really good outcomes and studying them more carefully could also result in improved standards and decreased complications and deaths.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.