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Comment by dollaaron | Hacker News Reader

When cardiologists are away, I'd imagine no non-emergency procedures/surgeries are performed (no heart transplants, quintuple bypasses, etc), which has to be a significant factor here.

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Aside: Cardiologists actually do not perform heart transplants or bypasses surgeries themselves, instead those are done by cardiothoracic surgeons. This is a pretty common misconception.

Do they not attend the same conferences, though?

I don't really know. This study looked at the ACA and AHA national conferences. I doubt there are many surgeons at the American Cardiology Association meeting; cardiology is highly specialized. There are probably some at the American Heart Association meeting.

Then that effect should appear in other disciplines, shouldn't it?

My understanding is that they only looked at cardiac patients, so that wouldn't contradict the study.

See mortality during the Canadian physicians' strike.

It might depend on how risky the surgery is in each discipline.

I'd expect heart and brain surgery to be among the riskiest, whereas other types of surgery might be significantly less risky. I wouldn't expect most cancer patients to die from their surgeries, for example.

Would depend on, among other things, how easy it is to "schedule" complicated cases. For some specialties this is straightforward, for others, it's not.

Well, it might be interesting to see whether there's a difference between cardiologists attending conferences (making patients feel like their cardiologist must be strongly committed to his/her specialty) vs. cardiologists who are away on vacation.

I'd have thought (without looking at any evidence) that planned, routine, surgery would have better outcomes than unplanned emergency surgery.

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