Expertise and infrastructure capacity impacts acute coronary syndrome outcomes.

Conclusions Both higher-level expertise in decision making and infrastructure capacity are associated with improved evidence translation and survival over 18 months of an ACS event and have clear healthcare design and policy implications.What is known about the topic? There are comprehensive guidelines for treating ACS patients, but Australia and New Zealand registry data reveal substantial gaps in delivery of best practice care across metropolitan, regional, rural and remote health services, raising questions of equity of access and outcome. Greater mortality and morbidity gains can be achieved by increasing the application of current evidence-based therapies than by developing new therapy innovations. Health service system characteristics may be barriers or enablers to the delivery of best practice care and need to be identified and evaluated for correlations with performance indicators and outcomes in order to improve health service design.What does this paper add? This study measures two system characteristics, namely expertise and infrastructure, evaluating the relationship with ACS guideline application and clinical outcomes in a large and diverse cohort of Australian and New Zealand hospitals. The study identifies decision-making expertise and infrastructure capacity, to a lesser degree, as enabling characteristics to help improve patient outcomes.What are the implications for practitioners? In the design of health services to improve access and equity, expertise must ...
Source: Australian Health Review - Category: Hospital Management Authors: Tags: Aust Health Rev Source Type: research