Photo Credit: Mihai

The following is a summary of “Interfacility transfer of the critically ill: Transfer status does not influence survival,” published in the August 2024 issue of Critical Care by McDougall et al.

Researchers conducted a retrospective study to evaluate dissimilarities in case-mix adjusted hospital mortality between adult ICU patients who were moved during their ICU stay and those who were not.

They analyzed 19,260 visits to 12 ICUs in Nova Scotia (NS), Canada, from April 2018 to September 2023. Data was obtained from the NS Provincial ICU database. Generalized additive models (GAMs) were used to estimate differences in case-mix adjusted hospital mortality between patients who underwent transfer and those who did not.

The results showed that 1040/19,260 (5%) ICU visits involved interfacility-transfer. There was no difference in-hospital mortality among patients transferred and non-transferred by GAM (OR, 0.99, 95% CI, 0.82 to 1.19; P=0.91), while no mortality difference was observed between patients undergoing a single transfer vs. multiple transfers (OR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.45 to −1.69; P=0.68) and GAM with the categories no transfer, 1 transfer, and multiple transfers recognized a difference in in-hospital mortality for patients that underwent multiple transfers compared to non-transferred patients (OR, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.46 to 1.00, P=0.05), but no difference was identified in a post-hoc matched cohort sensitivity analysis (OR, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.46 to 1.01, P=0.05).

Investigators concluded that transferring patients with critical illness between ICUs in NS did not impact case-mix-adjusted hospital mortality.

Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0883944124003009