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Ann Thorac Surg 1995;59:275-276
© 1995 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons

Editorial

National Surveys: Are They Helpful?

W. Randolph Chitwood, Jr, MD

Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, East Carolina University School of Medicine, Greenville, North Carolina

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

See also page 361.

National surveys are among the most difficult studies to plan, complete, interpret, and generate the appropriate fanfare for. This is especially true when attempting to track a diffuse and ever-changing topic such as myocardial protection. Opinions of surgeons as to optimal methods of intraoperative cardioprotection remain varied, empiric, and near dogmatic. For these and other reasons statistically sound data often are difficult to derive from surveys. In this edition of The Annals, Robinson and associates [1] have provided a well-conceived, comprehensive survey of current myocardial protective strategies from surgeons treating acquired cardiac disease. Moreover, their work has tracked the evolution of this technology through comparisons with earlier surveys.

Survey questionnaires take a great deal of time and effort to develop to obtain a maximal response. It is difficult to determine what factors influence response rates of surgeons to surveys. In the era of increasing paper work, busy surgeons seem even less inclined to fill out elective questionnaires. Response rates to seven general myocardial protection surveys since 1977 have

varied from 24% to 64% [2–8]. A lower response rate (32%) to the present survey perhaps resulted from the lengthy questionnaire (86 questions). However, the two-mailing effort of Robinson and associates maximized potential responses to this survey. At the same time, Izzat and colleagues [8] received a 87% response rate from 120 English consultant surgeons. Thus, the questionnaire becomes the . . . [Full Text of this Article]


Related Article

Myocardial Protection for Acquired Heart Disease Surgery: Results of a National Survey
Lary A. Robinson, G. Douglas Schwarz, David B. Goddard, William H. Fleming, and Timothy A. Galbraith
Ann. Thorac. Surg. 1995 59: 361-372. [Abstract] [Full Text]



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