Thank you for the help! What percent of Hospital A patients died? What percent o

Question

Thank you for the help! What percent of Hospital A patients died? What percent of Hospital B patients died? These are the numbers one might see reported in the media. 2.130 Patients in "poor" or "good" condition. Refer to the previous exercise. Not all surgery cases are equally serious, however. Patients are classified as being in either "poor" or "good" condition before surgery. Here are the data broken down by patient condition. The entries in the original two-way table are just the sums of the "poor" and "good" entries in this pair of tables. HOSP Good Condition Hospital A Hospital B Died Survived Total 594 600 592 600

Explanation / Answer

Part (a)

Out of 1500 patients with health condition classified as ‘poor’ prior to surgery, who were admitted into Hospital A, 57 died. Hence, the death rate = 57/1500 = 3.8 ANSWER 1

Out of 200 patients with health condition classified as ‘poor’ prior to surgery, who were admitted into Hospital B, 8 died. Hence, the death rate = 8/200 = 4.0 ANSWER 2

Since 3.8 and 4.0 are pretty close to each other, it does not make much sense to grade the two hospital with respect to death rate. ANSWER 3

Part (b)

Out of 600 patients with health condition classified as ‘good’ prior to surgery, who were admitted into Hospital A, 6 died. Hence, the death rate = 6/600 = 1.0 ANSWER 1

Out of 600 patients with health condition classified as ‘good’ prior to surgery, who were admitted into Hospital B, 8 died. Hence, the death rate = 8/600 = 1.3 ANSWER 2

Since 1.0 and 1.3 are pretty close to each other, it does not make much sense to grade the two hospital with respect to death rate. ANSWER 3

Part (c)

Looking at the death rate for the two categories of patients classified on the basis of pre-surgery health condition, there is hardly any scope for choosing between the two hospitals.

ANSWER

Part (d)

In the overall, Hospital A has recorded a death rate of 3.0 [i.e., (57 + 6)/(1500 + 600)] and

Hospital B has recorded a death rate of 2.0 [i.e., (8 + 8)/(600 + 200)].

Thus, it would seem Hospital A has a poor record of death rate.

But, this is not so really. The apparent high figure of A is only due to comparatively much larger number of patients of ‘poor’ condition getting admitted into A than B. ANSWER

[Just to confirm the above observation, suppose B also had admitted 1500 ‘poor’ patients and had a death rate of 4. Then, the overall death rate for B would be 68/2100 which is pretty close to 3.0 of A]

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