Successful Thesis Defense - Kevin McIntyre

Congratulations to Kevin McIntyre on his successful defense of his PhD thesis proposal! Kevin was co-supervised by Dr. Janet Martin (MEDICI Centre, Departments of Anesthesia & Perioperative Medicine and Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics) and Dr. Saverio Stranges (Departments of Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics and Family Medicine).

Title: An Examination of Global Perioperative Causes of Death

Summary: While there is a large and growing body of literature regarding surgery, to date there has been very little work done to systematically investigate the causes of perioperative mortality in a global context. This project proposes a systematic review and meta-analysis of the recent surgical literature to identify trends of perioperative mortality and key causes of death during the perioperative period among three indicator surgeries: Caesarean section, laparotomy, and the treatment of open fractures. These three procedures are termed the bellwether procedures as together they serve as an indication that an institution has the ability to provide most essential surgical procedures. Following the multilevel meta-regression, a secondary data analysis will be conducted using patient level data to investigate cause specific perioperative mortality in this cohort using Bayesian hierarchical modeling. Finally, a third study will use a hierarchical propensity score inverse probability of treatment weighted model to investigate the impact of complications on perioperative mortality through the failure-to-rescue pathway in this cohort.