Where Physician Completed Obstetrical Residency May Provide Quality of Care Indicator

How well do you make choices of your OB GYN? From what Aunt Emma recommends? If the doc seems "nice"? There may be some empirical help.


From Newswise, the journalists'-only site via the Journal of the American Medical Association:

Released: 9/17/2009 5:00 PM EDT
Embargo expired: 9/22/2009 4:00 PM EDT
Source: American Medical Association (AMA)

Newswise — A ranking of obstetrics and gynecology training programs based on the maternal complication rates of their graduates’ patients found these rankings consistent across individual types of complications, suggesting that these rates may reflect measures of overall quality, according to a study in the September 23/30 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on medical education....

“These results may have important implications for patients,” they add. “If these findings are confirmed and refined, women might select obstetricians in part by where they were trained. The general consistency in programs’ rankings despite different measures of quality supports the validity of the measures and also suggests that top programs may be likely to produce physicians who are better in unmeasured ways as well.”

(JAMA. 2009;302[12]:1277-1283.