Chapter 2561: Three Outcomes

There’s no real difference, it’s just that there are too many patients, and one department isn’t enough. Splitting into two departments makes it easier to manage. This isn’t quite the same as the division between General Surgery Department One and General Surgery Department Two at Guoxie. The division between General Surgery Department One and Two is for competitive purposes. The division between Pediatric Heart Surgery One and Two is due to the need for more senior management personnel.

What do you mean?

Too many critically ill patients.

Pediatric heart surgery is not like adult heart surgery; it’s primarily focused on congenital heart disease. Many congenital heart diseases, if not treated surgically during childhood, won’t just result in losing surgical opportunities in adulthood but can mean losing the chance altogether, leading to waiting for death.

For this reason, Duan Sanbao reminds the new students, "Don’t believe what patients introduced by others say. First, re-examine and investigate the results in our hospital before saying anything. Some families lie a bit to get us to admit the patient."

"Why, why?" Wei Shangquan and Dai Nanhui asked in unison.

Lying to the doctor about the patient’s condition is of no use. How can these families be so foolish?

"Don’t you know? The surgeries truly effective performed by heart surgeons account for less than a quarter."

Heart surgery and neurosurgery are called the two major specialties for this reason. Surgeries in these departments often yield disappointing results, no matter how legendary the doctor is, this can be the outcome.

Xie Wanying quickly remembered Xiao Zhang’s mother’s surgery that night; Senior Cao knew early on that the surgery wouldn’t prevent the patient’s death. That’s just the nature of neurosurgery. Now listening to Doctor Duan, heart surgery seems the same. Doctors in these two specialties need to be immensely psychologically resilient, or they’ll be crushed by reality daily.

Specifically, the results of surgeries in these two specialties might be: some surgeries upon completion are found unnecessary, some surgeries are worse than not doing them, some surgeries results in patients having further issues afterward, only a portion of surgeries are effective and can lead to cure.

Actually, across the entire surgery spectrum, the results after surgery are the same three possibilities: either death, recovery, or half-dead.

Doctors didn’t hide these results from patients and their families. The terms clearly stated in the pre-operative informed consent address these three outcomes. It’s just that negative surgical outcomes in heart and neurosurgery are disproportionately high.

Generally, when patients or their families are informed of such frightening risks, they will surely be afraid, and some patients or families will retreat and choose not to proceed. Some families demonstrate the opposite behavior; they insist on surgery regardless of anything.

Whether to perform the surgery or not, and whether it can be performed, is up to the doctor to decide. However, if you admit the patient but then decide not to perform the surgery, hey, you’re a surgeon, not a physician; it’s tantamount to deception for a free hospital stay and is fraud. So Doctor Duan Sanbao mentioned earlier, some families come and lie to the doctors, trying to get the doctors to admit the patient first, which indirectly forces doctors to perform surgeries.

"Previously, there was a child in the department like this. Our doctors felt not performing surgery could prolong life by several years, but the family insisted on taking the risk, and the child ultimately died on the operating table." Duan Sanbao said, "Later, the department head severely criticized the young doctor who admitted the patient for hospitalization."

The young doctors listening to the story were immediately educated.

Being overly compassionate as a doctor in such matters isn’t a good thing.