Meeting Guidelines Isn’t Enough To Prove Hospital Competence

On behalf of Lovett Law Firm posted in Brain Injury on Thursday, August 20, 2015.

Traumatic brain injuries are serious injuries to the brain such as concussions, aneurisms, and bleeding or pressure on the brain. Usually, hospitals follow special guidelines for treating these injuries, but a study has shown that using the guidelines doesn’t mean a patient is going to have a better outcome.

As a patient suffering from a TBI or a loved one of a patient who is hoping for the best, it’s important to understand that while guidelines should be followed, you can’t base good care on meeting certain percentages on a chart. It’s possible for certain aspects of a TBI review to look good, but the reality could be that more could have been done to help your loved one instead of meeting the bare minimum for standards.

By looking at how hospitals and risk-adjusted mortality rates added up across 14 hospitals in a study, researchers found that it’s impossible to look at compliance estimates from hospitals and to then say whether or not the hospital had good or bad clinical outcomes. There is no association with following the specific guidelines and treating patients with the care hospitals felt they should receive and getting patients better faster.

Basically, the study shows that you can’t simply look at a hospital’s adherence to guidelines to show if a patient has received optimal treatment for a TBI. It doesn’t tell you anything about the way the hospital practices care. In fact, patient recovery depends on much more than the adherence to some medical guidelines, which is why it’s hard to say if a patient recovered because of extra monitoring of the intracranial pressure or if he simply would have recovered without that monitoring at all.

Source: MedPage Today, “TBI Tx Quality Measures Don’t Predict Outcomes,” Hanneke Weitering, accessed Aug. 20, 2015