J Natl Med Assoc
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Between 1998 and 2015, the national coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) in-hospital mortality rate fell nearly 45% to just 2.2% of CABG in-patients. By almost any standards, this large decline in the nation's in-hospital mortality for CABG inpatients has been extraordinary. Yet, over this time period, no studies have detailed these notable trends in in-hospital CABG mortality with an emphasis on the differences by gender and racial/ethnicity. The in-hospital CABG treatment period is the approximately 9 day inpatient length-of-stay the patient is completely under the care of hospital and its staff. Our research seeks to fill this research gap with analyses of 18 years of national data of over 5 million CABG inpatient discharges distinguishing gender by six categories of race/ethnicity (Asian, black, Hispanic, white, other known races/ethnicities, and unknown race/ethnicities) to evaluate three broad questions related to in-hospital CABG mortality: 1) What have been the 18-year national trends in CABG surgeries, length-of-stay, mortality, and type of discharge by gender and race/ethnicity? 2) Over time, what have been the in-hospital mortality trends by gender and race-ethnicity? 3) Using multivariate techniques to control for patient characteristics, risk factors and socioeconomic characteristics of the hospital setting and environment, what is the extent of the variations in in-hospital mortality among the 12 groupings of gender and race-ethnicity? ⋯ While considerable progress has been made reducing overall in-hospital CABG mortality over the past 18-years across all gender and racial/ethnic inpatients, significant gaps persist between black males and other racial/ethnic groups.
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In spite of emphasis on patient-centered cares and promotion of their quality, shortcomings have been seen in health systems due to lack of compassion. ⋯ Although compassionate care has been known as the main element of improving services quality in health care system, it has been studied restrictively from the viewpoints of the patients and all personnel in healthcare systems. The improvement of compassionate care through education cannot remove completely the gap between theory and practice, because it seems that clinical environment and organizational values of healthcare system are the largest facilitating and inhibiting factors for filling this gap. Therefore, it is necessary to take measures for promoting organizational culture.