Table 4.

—Association of Attending Physician Specialty With Nurse-Assessed Outcomes^a

Nurse-Assessed Outcome	Patients	Nurses	P Valueb	Regression Coefficientb
				Medicine	Surgery	Neurosurgery	Neurology
Quality-of-dying ratingc	1,118	562	< .001	Ref	−0.596d	1.157e	0.860f
Quality of care by all providersg	1,193	583	.029	Ref	−0.159	0.463	0.415
Satisfaction, team met family’s needsh	1,149	568	.665	Ref	−0.185	−0.066	0.195

See Table 3 legend for expansion of abbreviation.

^aAssociations for all outcomes were tested with complex multipredictor regression models, with patients clustered under nurses and estimates based on restricted maximum likelihood. Two outcomes (the quality of dying rating, satisfaction with how well the team met the family’s needs) were tested with linear regression; the other outcome (quality of care by all providers) was censored from above and was tested with Tobit regression. All models included covariate adjustment for hospital (13 dummy indicators) in addition to outcome-specific confounder adjustments noted in subsequent table footnotes.

^bThe overall P value for physician specialty is based on the reduction in deviance obtained in a model in which the coefficients for the three dummy indicators for physician specialty were freely estimated, when compared with a model in which the three specialty-related regression coefficients were constrained to 0.0.

^cScore could range from 0 (terrible quality) to 10 (perfect quality).

^dP < .05.

^eP < .001.

^fP < .01.

^gScore could range from 0 (worst possible care) to 10 (best possible care). This model included covariate adjustment for nurse’s racial minority status.

^hScore could range from 0 (not satisfied at all) to 10 (very satisfied). This model included covariate adjustment for patient disease (cancer, trauma, other) and nurse’s racial minority status.