This specialty treats patients that may have the same age group, diagnosis- and procedure group as patients treated by other specialty, but often the patients treated by geriatrics have a more complex syndrome and stay longer in hospital because of their frailty.
Model 1 was a naïve analysis with the number of specialties treating a patient as variable.
No large differences were found in the main causes for the number of specialties treating patients.
This method also has some limitations concerning the number of specialties treating a patient.
The more specialties treating a patient the greater the risk of an adverse event.
This study highlights the importance of taking the number of specialties treating a patient into account.
In conclusion, treatment preferences differ between individual patients, individual oncologists, and oncologists from different specialties treating the same patient.
To our knowledge this is the first study linking AEs and the number of specialties treating a patient.
Descriptive statistics on patient and admission characteristics by the number of specialties treating a patient were analysed using SPSS 20.0.
