Does Emergency General Surgery (EGS) Hospital Volume Contribute to Improved Outcomes?

Purpose of Review This review outlines the current state of the literature regarding the effect of hospital emergency general surgery (EGS) volume on patient- and hospital-based outcomes. Recent Findings Recent evidence suggests that higher volume centers offer superior performance with respect to in-hospital mortality, a phenomenon that becomes more pronounced with increasingly complex or high-risk operations. High-quality studies have demonstrated that hospital EGS volume is correlated with lower in-patient mortality. This finding has been demonstrated across individual EGS operations with increasing case complexity requiring higher volumes to demonstrate improved outcomes. There remains a knowledge gap in determining what specific factor of volume, such as surgeon volume or system experience or possibly a combination of the two, best explains the observed improvement in outcomes.