Dive Brief:
- A report published this week in BMJ Quality & Safety finds that patients who are admitted into a hospital for an emergncy over the weekend are more likely to die within 30 days than those patients who are admitted during the week. (The also research found the risk of death for patients undergoing planned surgery was very low.)
- The issue has long been known as "the weekend effect" and has been documented in numerous previous studies. This latest study, however, increases the scope of research by looking at a large number of international admissions. It utilizes data on nearly 3 million admissions from 2009 to 2012 at 28 teaching hospitals in England, Australia, the U.S. and The Netherlands.
- The report found that the risk of death within 30 days of admission was higher for weekend patients in three of the four countries studied. The risk was 8% higher in England; 13% higher in the U.S.; and 20% higher at Dutch hospitals.
Dive Insight:
The authors ackowledge that the research does not target the reasons for the weekend effect, but they do speculate that it comes down to lower staffing levels or slower/more limited services.
As an example, study coauthor Paul Aylin, a professor of the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, notes "Our own work around stroke care in the U.K. suggests that patients admitted at the weekends are less likely to get a same day brain scan, less likely to get clot-busting treatment and have worse outcomes across a range of indicators."
The study suggests there may also be a possible "July effect" due to the beginning of the academic year for many medical trainees, and that another consideration is whether or not a facility is a teaching hospital.