The Effect of Regionalization of Thoracic Surgery on Blood Transfusion at the Ottawa Hospital
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This paper examines the impact of Cancer Care Ontario’s regionalization of lung cancer surgery on blood transfusion use for thoracic surgery at The Ottawa Hospital. Using aggregate data scraped from the paper “Changing trends in blood transfusion: an analysis of 244,013 hospitalizations” by Shehata et al. (2014) we estimated the effect regionalization on the log mean number of blood transfusions among thoracic surgeons (who treat lung cancer), utilizing other surgical specialties as controls. We found that the average number of blood transfusions increased significantly among thoracic surgeons following the opening of a new cancer care centre at the hospital in December 2009, while control specialties showed no parallel change. Contextualizing these results in a modified “population level” treatment threshold model, it is argued that the main driver of this increase in blood transfusions among thoracic surgeons was due to the influx of less skilled thoracic surgeons to The Ottawa Hospital, and the closing of thoracic surgery units at smaller hospitals which was part of the broader regionalization process.
Source: medRxiv
Authors: Jacob Smith, Benjamin Smith, Tyler Pittman
Institutions: University of Toronto, University of Saskatchewan
Language: English
Subfield: Hematology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222961302