Reporting Failure to Rescue Lands in Europe

Schwappach et al 1 have provided a new examination of hospital surgical quality across Switzerland using a failure to rescue (FTR) methodology.This is an important study that describes potential differences in quality across 61 Swiss hospitals and may serve as an example for other countries to follow.Measuring hospital quality of care is essential for understanding and improving quality.Traditionally, when using administrative data to compare observed to expected outcome rates, hospital surgical care had been evaluated by examining the death rate or the complication rate.The problem with the complication rate has always been its variability and dependence on patient severity of illness, which may be difficult to measure precisely with administrative data. 2 In 1992, a new outcome measure for hospital surgical quality was developed, the FTR rate, 3 which was defined as the probability of death given a complication.FTR measures the ability of a hospital to manage +