Physician experience and outcomes among patients admitted to general internal medicine teaching wards

Patient characteristics, resource use and outcomes associated with general internal medicine hospital care: the General Medicine Inpatient Initiative (GEMINI) retrospective cohort study

“…In 2 studies, both involving about 10 000 patients at 7 teaching hospitals in Alberta, the most prevalent discharge diagnoses were chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia, heart failure, urinary tract infection and venous thromboembolism, and the in-hospital death rate ranged from 3.9% to 7.4% across hospitals. 29,30 The median length of stay in our study was 4.6 days, similar to that in studies in the United States and Europe (4.0). 31,32 Patients admitted to §Readmission to general internal medicine service at 1 of the participating hospitals within 30 days of discharge.…”

“…Third, our study was conducted in 7 teaching hospitals in Canada's largest metropolitan area. Our patient sample is broadly similar to that in other studies in general internal medicine in Canada, the US and Europe, [29][30][31][32] and our findings are likely generalizable to other urban and suburban academic health centres and large community hospitals, but the sample may not be representative of patients or practices in other settings. Fourth, we were able to capture readmission to general internal medicine only at hospitals within our network.…”

Prevalence and Costs of Discharge Diagnoses in Inpatient General Internal Medicine: a Multi-center Cross-sectional Study

“…The consistency of our findings across a range of urban and suburban hospitals with different models of teaching and non-teaching GIM services, and different access to inpatient subspecialty wards, strengthens our confidence in the generalizability of our findings. Further, in addition to similarity to the study by Duckitt and colleagues, 23 the GEMINI study cohort was previously reported 6 to be broadly similar to other GIM populations in Canada, 18,19 Europe, 20,24 and the USA. 22 GIM services represent a large proportion of inpatient care and treat patients with a diversity of diseases.…”

“…Although many studies are conducted in GIM inpatient populations, [18][19][20][21][22] very few explicitly evaluate the most common conditions cared for in GIM. A study of 1501 consecutive patients in 18 European countries over a 3-month period found that the most common conditions on internal medicine hospital wards were pneumonia (8.2%), heart failure (6.3%), atrial fibrillation/flutter (3.1%), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (3.1%), and urinary tract infection (2.7%).…”

Characteristics of short general internal medicine hospital stays: a multicentre cross-sectional study

“…Physician characteristics included years since medical school graduation and sex because physician experience and sex have been associated with differences in physician practice and quality of inpatient care. [23][24][25] Situational factors included the day of admission (weekend or weekday), time of admission (day [0800-1659:59], evening [1700-2400] or night [0000:01-0759:59]), admission to a short-stay unit (which was available at 2 participating hospitals) and the volume of admissions to general internal medicine in the previous 12 hours (prespecified as a measure of the workload of the admitting general internal medicine physicians in the emergency department). We examined these situational factors because the quality of hospital care has been shown to differ on the weekend and after hours [26][27][28][29] and with changes in physician workload.…”