Researchers from the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, say more research is needed to understand why patients are more likely to die in the hospital on the weekend.
Richard Lilford, PhD, and Yen-Fu Chen, MD, of the University’s Warwick Medical School, raised the issue following a study published by BMJ Quality & Safety that says hospital weekend death risk is common in several developed countries including the United States. “Understanding this is an extremely important task since it is large, at about 10% in relative risk terms and 0.4% in percentage point terms,” Lilford says. “This amounts to about 160 additional deaths in a hospital with 40,000 discharges per year.”
Lilford and Chen wrote an editorial linked to the paper confirming the existence of the “weekend effect” in many countries. (See the editorial at http://tinyurl.com/omzl5e9.)
The research found that the heightened risk of death after admission to a hospital on the weekend is a feature of several developed countries’ healthcare systems. The researchers looked at data on almost 3 million admissions between 2009 and 2012 from 28 metropolitan teaching hospitals in England, Australia, the United States, and the Netherlands.
They focused on deaths occurring in the hospital within 30 days of an emergency admission or elective surgery. They found that, after taking account of influential factors, the risk of dying within 30 days was higher for emergency admissions at weekends for 22 of the 28 hospitals.
This risk was 13% higher in the five U.S. hospitals, 8% higher in 11 English hospitals, and 20% higher in six Dutch hospitals. There was no daily variation in the heightened risk of death after 30 days for emergency admissions at weekends in the Australian hospitals, and these hospitals had the largest proportion of emergency admissions. But those admitted on a Saturday were 12% more likely to die within seven days. All patients admitted on the weekend for elective surgery were more likely to die within 30 days across the board than those admitted on other days of the week, the findings showed.
