Racial disparity in hospital survival rate

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 18 (UPI) -- Elderly white patients have better surgical survival rates at U.S. teaching-intensive hospitals than blacks, researchers have found.

The study, published in the Archives of Surgery, analyzed U.S. Medicare claims from 4.6 million surgical patients ages 65 to 90 at 3,270 acute care hospitals from 2000 to 2005. Hospitals were classified as non-teaching hospitals if they had no physicians who were residents. Teaching hospitals were scaled by their ratio of residents to hospital beds.

"We found an advantage in surgical outcomes for patients in teaching-intensive hospitals compared to non-teaching hospitals, as we had expected from other studies," Dr. Jeffrey H. Silber, study leader and director of the Center for Outcomes Research at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, said in a statement.

"What we didn't expect was that better outcomes in teaching hospitals occurred for white patients but not for black patients."

Furthermore, the survival advantage from teaching hospitals came from lower death rates after complications, not from lower complication rates, Silber said.