Adherence to Cardiac Surgical Waitlist Guidelines is a Poor Predictor of Cardiac Surgery Waitlist Mortality
Purpose: To derive a clinical prediction tool for cardiac waitlist mortality that incorporates clinical and cardiac structural information into existing clinical practice guidelines
Conclusions:
1. Cardiac surgical waitlist mortality currently stands at approximately 0.8% of cases.
2. In a large population-based provincial cohort, we observed that adherence to cardiac surgical waitlist recommendations alone was a poor predictor of waitlist mortality.
3. Our clinical prediction model has excellent discrimination and calibration that incorporates pre-operative clinical and cardiac structural variables along with existing guidelines.
4. There is a need to re-evaluate cardiac surgical triage criteria and implement a more evidence based approach toward preventing waitlist mortality.
