When nurses more educated

“As the population ages, hospitals will be faced with the challenges of caring for an increasing number of frail, cognitively impaired older adults,” White said by email.

“Our findings suggest that transitioning to a largely (college-educated) nursing workforce, as the Institute of Medicine recommends, would contribute to improved surgical outcomes for this population.”

Researchers examined data on surgical patients 65 and older covered by Medicare, the US health program for the elderly, who had general surgery, orthopedic procedures or vascular operations at 531 acute care hospitals in California, Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The study included 46,163 people with Alzheimer’s or dementia as well as a control group of 307,170 people who didn’t have these conditions.

Overall, 12,369 patients, or 3.5 percent, died within 30 days of admission to the hospital, researchers report in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Mortality rates were much higher — at eight percent — for dementia patients, compared with less than three percent for the people without dementia.

On average, about 38 percent of nurses had at least a four-year bachelor’s degree, although the proportion ranged from zero to 74 percent. Larger hospitals, teaching hospitals and high-technology facilities all tended to have more college-educated nurses.

After researchers accounted for the type of surgery and individual hospital and patient characteristics, each 10 percent increase in the proportion of nurses with at least a bachelor’s degree was linked to four percent lower odds of death for patients without dementia and 10 percent lower odds of death for patients with dementia.

The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how nurses’ education might directly influence survival odds for