Table 1 Characteristics of patients in different physician workload groups
Physician workload (the number of patients physician cared for per day) | P value | ||
|---|---|---|---|
≧1 (n = 1328) | <  1 (n = 550) | ||
N (%) | N (%) | ||
Gender | 0.98 | ||
 Male | 895 (67.40) | 371 (67.46) | |
 Female | 433 (32.60) | 179 (32.54) | |
Age, years (Mean ± SD) | 61.91 ± 14.50 | 61.26 ± 16.48 | 0.42 |
Religion | 0.19 | ||
 Others | 633 (47.67) | 286 (52.00) | |
 Buddhist/Daoist | 614 (46.23) | 237 (43.09) | |
 Christian/Catholic | 81 (6.10) | 27 (4.91) | |
Education, years | 0.01 | ||
  > 12 | 425 (32.00) | 142 (25.82) | |
 1–12 | 771 (58.06) | 359 (65.27) | |
 0 | 132 (9.94) | 49 (8.91) | |
Marital status | < 0.01 | ||
 Married | 1053 (79.29) | 388 (70.54) | |
 Others | 275 (20.71) | 162 (29.46) | |
Working fulltime | 0.87 | ||
 Yes | 505 (38.03) | 207 (37.64) | |
 No | 823 (61.97) | 343 (62.36) | |
Residence | 0.33 | ||
 Rural area | 65 (4.90) | 33 (6.00) | |
 Urban area | 1263 (95.10) | 517 (94.00) | |
Diagnosis | < 0.01 | ||
 Non-operative, cardiac failure/insufficiency | 672 (50.60) | 230 (41.82) | |
 Non-operative, others | 58 (4.37) | 52 (9.45) | |
 Post-operative, major surgery | 412 (31.02) | 131 (23.82) | |
 Post-operative others | 186 (14.01) | 137 (24.91) | |
TISS (Mean ± SD) | 32.74 ± 10.13 | 30.25 ± 12.10 | < 0.01 |
Length of surgical ICU stay, days (Mean ± SD) | 6.72 ± 11.13 | 5.74 ± 17.27 | 0.15 |