In the article "Comparing hospital performance within and across countries: an illustrative study of coronary artery bypass graft surgery in England and Spain", signed by a Spanish-English team in which Sandra García Armesto (IACS) and Enrique Bernal (REDISSEC) participated, it was concluded that the Spanish hospitals of the study operated in general with a smaller number of cases than the English (it was coronary bypass). Therefore, it is suggested that the number of cases intervened should be a tracer that could explain why mortality from this process is twice as high in Spain as in England.
European Collaboration for Healthcare Optimization (ECHO) is a European network of administrative databases for the analysis of clinical practice variations. In the following article: "Hospital Surgical Volumes and Mortality after Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting: Using International Comparisons to Determine Safe Threshold", carried out by almost the same authors as the previous one, based on data from the ECHO project, confirms that for interventions of coronary bypass there is a clear relationship between volume and mortality and concludes that the minimum limit of interventions of a cardiac surgery team, if you want to safeguard the safety of patients, should be 415 per year. In the following graph (from the previous article) it is observed how the Spanish hospitals that participated in the study (dark spots), generally underwent fewer coronary bypasses (many did not reach 200) and showed greater mortalities.
