A new study at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) demonstrates how having two attending surgeons in the operating room during spinal surgeries can benefit patients in multiple ways.
In 2007, two spinal surgeons in the Departments of Neurological Surgery and Orthopedic Surgery joined forces and began doing certain complex, high-risk procedures together, and now they have published their findings on the benefits of having them both in the operating room.
“We found very dramatic results,“ said UCSF neurosurgeon Christopher Ames, MD, who led the study with his co-senior author, orthopaedic surgeon Vedat Deviren, MD.
Published in the inaugural issue of Spine Deformity, the data show that surgeries with two attending physicians tended to be much shorter, averaging five hours instead of eight. Patients also suffered less blood loss, had fewer major complications and enjoyed shorter hospital stays – all of which should help lower health care costs, though the UCSF team did not specifically model how much money this approach would save if widely implemented.
The major benefit to patients is more favourable outcomes, said Deviren. “There is no way we would go back to how we used to perform these surgeries with single surgeons,“ he said.
Complex surgeries
The particular procedure considered in the study was apedicle subtraction osteotomy, a surgery that realigns the spine in
cases of very severe deformities, many of which arise from alignment complications of prior surgery and severe degenerative spinal arthritis.
After they began collaborating five years ago, Ames and Deviren became convinced that working together had a positive impact on their patients, but they wanted to quantify how much. They compared 42 patients who underwent the surgery at UCSF with a single surgeon, versus 36 patients who had the same procedures under the care of two attending surgeons.
They found that in addition to spending less time in the operating room, patients in the group with two surgeons suffered half as much blood loss on average during surgery and were much less likely to have major complications.
