Research Bursary Program
Supervisor Project Proposal for Summer 2015
Supervisor Last Name: Fraser
Supervisor First Name: Shannon
McGill Dept/School: Surgery
Faculty Professor (Full, Associate or Assistant): Associate
Email: shannon.fraser@mcgill.ca
Phone No. (optional):
Research Field: Quality of Care
Proposal No. (1 or 2): 1
Research Location (McGill or affiliated institution): Jewish General Hospital
Ethics approval will be required for proposed project (Yes/No): No
Proposed project will involve chart reviews (Yes/No): No
Project Title (maximum 1 line): The cost of surgical complications: a NSQIP Canadian Collaborative comparison.
Hypothesis/Question to be Addressed (maximum 4 lines): What is the cost of surgical complications and how do
we compare within the hospitals participating in the NSQIP Canadian Collaborative?
Specific Aims (maximum 10 lines):
Surgical site and urinary tract infections (SSI, UTI) are potentially preventable complications that not only
adversely affect the patient, but also add a significant burden to our health care system. The National Surgical
Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) is a Quality Assurance program used to benchmark quality of care for
surgical patients against program participants standardizing for patient characteristics. The program provides
information about several different post-operative outcomes including infectious complications. The aim of this
study is to determine the cost of these complications for our institution and to compare it to that of the other
Canadian institutions participating in the NSQIP Canadian Collaborative. If time allows, evaluation of the costs of
interventions to address SSI and UTI will also be collected to perform a cost-effectiveness analysis of the NSQIP
investment.
Role of Student (maximum 15 lines):
The student will liaise with our institution’s NSQIP abstractors to determine the General Surgery complication
rates for 2013 and 2014. After performing a literature review to determine evidence-based Canadian costs for SSI
and UTI complications in additional days of stay (length of stay) in addition to dollars, the student will determine
the institutional costs of the complications. Based on these findings the student will then have facilitated contact
with the other participating Canadian Collaborative Institutions to determine comparable data and make a
comparison. Based on this data the student will prepare a report, which will be presented at Grand Rounds as
well as submitted as an abstract to the annual NSQIP conference. If successful, the student will receive funding to
attend the conference.