"Letter to the South Bend Tribune Editor about Memorial Hospital", 1986 April 30
Title
"Letter to the South Bend Tribune Editor about Memorial Hospital", 1986 April 30
Description
Gloria Kaufman's letter to the South Bend Tribune about the high mortality rate in the Memorial Hospital for coronary bypass surgery.
Source
Gloria Kaufman Papers, Indiana University South Bend Archives and Special Collections
Date
1986 April 30
Rights
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Text
305 Wakewa Avenue South Bend, IN 46617 3O April 1986
South Bend TRIBUNE South Bend, Indiana
TO THE EDITOR:
Memorial Hospital of South Bend has been cited by the Public Citizen's Health Research Group (Washington, D.C.) as one of 33 hospitals with excessively high death rates for coronary artery bypass surgery. In fact, only ten hospitals in the country had a worse record for 1984. 86 Medicare patients were operated on with a predicted mortality rate of 5.5%. The actual mortality rate was 20.9%. Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe advises families and patients needing coronoary bypass surgery to avoid hospitals which do fewer than 200 such operations per year. Data show that hospitals doing more than 350 bypass surgeries had death rates of less than 2%,
Dr, Wolfe writes: "Hospitals doing too few of these operations are killing too many patients and should seriously consider stopping ...this operation ... Centralizing such operations so that fewer hospitals each do more of them is an old idea which ... boards of trustees of local hospitals can take action about."
Gloria Kaufman
South Bend TRIBUNE South Bend, Indiana
TO THE EDITOR:
Memorial Hospital of South Bend has been cited by the Public Citizen's Health Research Group (Washington, D.C.) as one of 33 hospitals with excessively high death rates for coronary artery bypass surgery. In fact, only ten hospitals in the country had a worse record for 1984. 86 Medicare patients were operated on with a predicted mortality rate of 5.5%. The actual mortality rate was 20.9%. Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe advises families and patients needing coronoary bypass surgery to avoid hospitals which do fewer than 200 such operations per year. Data show that hospitals doing more than 350 bypass surgeries had death rates of less than 2%,
Dr, Wolfe writes: "Hospitals doing too few of these operations are killing too many patients and should seriously consider stopping ...this operation ... Centralizing such operations so that fewer hospitals each do more of them is an old idea which ... boards of trustees of local hospitals can take action about."
Gloria Kaufman
Collection
Citation
“"Letter to the South Bend Tribune Editor about Memorial Hospital", 1986 April 30,” IU South Bend Archives Digital Collections, accessed May 6, 2024, https://iusbarchives.omeka.net/items/show/218.