Generalist vs specialist acute medical admissions - What is the impact of moving towards acute medical subspecialty admissions on efficacy of care provision?

Why the NHS needs adult generalists: A call for single certification in general internal medicine

As the UK NHS faces growing challenges of the ageing population and escalating healthcare costs, we examine the role of the general internal medicine (GIM) consultant in inpatient medicine. We argue that the reintroduction of GIM could provide a sustainable and valuable contribution to high-quality, cost-effective inpatient care drawing on parallels from the GIM hospitalist model in the USA. Additionally, GIM expansion could contribute to improved outcomes for complex medical patients and surgical patients, as well as safety and quality initiatives.

Development and assessment of scoring model for ICU stay and mortality prediction after emergency admissions in ischemic heart disease: a retrospective study of MIMIC-IV databases

Ischemic heart disease (IHD) is the leading cause of death and emergency department (ED) admission. We aimed to develop more accurate and straightforward scoring models to optimize the triaging of IHD patients in ED. This was a retrospective study based on the MIMIC-IV database. Scoring models were established by AutoScore formwork based on machine learning algorithm. The predictive power was measured by the area under the curve in the receiver operating characteristic analysis, with the prediction of intensive care unit (ICU) stay, 3d-death, 7d-death, and 30d-death after emergency admission. A total of 8381 IHD patients were included (median patient age, 71 years, 95% CI 62-81; 3035 [36%] female), in which 5867 episodes were randomly assigned to the training set, 838 to validation set, and 1676 to testing set. In total cohort, there were 2551 (30%) patients transferred into ICU; the mortality rates were 1% at 3 days, 3% at 7 days, and 7% at 30 days. In the testing cohort, the areas under the curve of scoring models for shorter and longer term outcomes prediction were 0.7551 (95% CI 0.7297-0.7805) for ICU stay, 0.7856 (95% CI 0.7166-0.8545) for 3d-death, 0.7371 (95% CI 0.6665-0.8077) for 7d-death, and 0.7407 (95% CI 0.6972-0.7842) for 30d-death. This newly accurate and parsimonious scoring models present good discriminative performance for predicting the possibility of transferring to ICU, 3d-death, 7d-death, and 30d-death in IHD patients visiting ED.

Relevant vs non-relevant subspecialist for patients hospitalised in internal medicine at a local hospital: which is better? A retrospective cohort study

Background

Studies of the treatment of patients in-hospital with a specific diagnosis show that physicians with a subspecialisation relevant to this diagnosis can provide a better quality of care. However, studies including patients with a range of diagnoses show a more negligible effect of being attended by a relevant subspecialist. This project aimed to study a more extensive set of patients and diagnoses in an environment where the subspecialist present could be controlled. Thus, this study investigated whether being attended by a physician with a subspeciality relevant to the patient’s primary diagnosis was prospectively associated with readmission, in-hospital mortality, or length of stay compared to a physician with a subspeciality not relevant to the patient’s primary diagnosis.

Methods

We have conducted a retrospective register-based study of 11,059 hospital admissions across 9 years at a local hospital in south-eastern Norway, where it was possible to identify the physician attending the patients at the beginning of the stay. The outcomes studied were emergency readmissions to the same ward within 30 days, any in-hospital mortality and the total length of stay. The patients admitted were matched with the consultant(s) responsible for their treatment. Then, the admissions were divided into two groups according to their primary diagnosis. Was their diagnosis within the subspeciality of the attending consultant (relevant subspecialist) or not (non-relevant subspecialist). The two groups were then compared using bivariable and multivariable models adjusted for patient characteristics, comorbidities, diagnostic group and physician sex.

Results

A relevant subspecialist was present during the first 3 days in 8058 (73%) of the 11,059 patient cases. Patients attended to by a relevant subspecialist had an odds ratio (OR) of 0.91 (95% confidence interval 0.76 to 1.09) for being readmitted and 0.71 (0.48 to 1.04) for dying in the hospital and had a length of stay that was 0.18 (− 0.07 to 0.42) days longer than for those attended to by a non-relevant subspecialist.

Conclusions

This study found that patients attended by a relevant subspecialist did not have a significantly different outcome to those attended by a non-relevant subspecialist.