Prostate cancer surgery better at teaching hospitals, study finds

Patients who undergo radical prostatectomy (RP) fare better at teaching hospitals than at nonacademic medical institutions, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan.

Although these findings do not imply that teaching hospitals always provide better care, such facilities do have certain intrinsic characteristics that may explain these better results, says Quoc-Dien Trinh, MD, a fellow at the hospital's Vattikuti Urology Institute and lead author of the study.

The study, which the authors believe to be the first of its kind, was published in the November 2011 issue of the Journal of Urology.1 Researchers drew on data from the US Department of Health and Human Services' Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, analyzing nearly 90,000 radical prostatectomies performed from 2001 through 2007. Nearly 60% of these procedures were performed at teaching hospitals. Compared with patients who underwent the surgery at nonacademic institutions, these patients had fewer complications after surgery, fewer blood transfusions, and shorter hospital stays. Even after adjusting findings for hospitals with heavy caseloads, the teaching institutions still had better results.

Some reasons why teaching hospitals may have better results for the surgery include the fact that they have more subspecialities and that every level of clinical decision-making is subjected to peer review, which may lead to a better selection of candidates for RP surgery. It also may lead to better medical care, including initial diagnostic testing and other tests during and after surgery, the researchers say.