People admitted to English hospitals in an emergency at the weekend have a greater chance of dying than those admitted during the week, a study finds.
The study, in Quality & Safety in Health Care, analysed the deaths of patients admitted as emergencies to 163 acute hospital trusts in England during 2005/06. It reveals a 7% higher mortality rate for emergency admissions over the weekend. It was particularly evident in conditions like heart attack, heart failure, stroke, some cancers and aortic aneurysms.
The study’s authors say the higher than expected mortality rates may be linked to less consistent specialist services, such as diagnostics, at weekends and a decrease in the availability of senior hospital staff.
In the study, by researchers from Imperial College London and Dr Foster Intelligence, the researchers reviewed 215,054 deaths out of a total of 4,317,866 admissions.
Comparing the expected number of deaths with the actual number of deaths identified at the weekend the researchers found there were 3,369 more deaths than expected at the weekend in 2005/06.
Author Dr Paul Aylin said: “We need to get to the bottom of what this means. Staffing levels are often lower at weekends, with fewer senior medical staff around, and some specialist services are less available. We believe this may be contributing to the increase in mortality rates on Saturdays and Sundays but we would like to see more research.
“Hospitals have been reassessing the working hours and rotas of their doctors and, considering the impact that staff availability may be having on mortality rates, this is a timely reminder to hospitals that they must take care not to jeopardise the quality and standard of patient care available at weekends when devising new staffing rotas.”
These findings follow the Temple review into training under the Working Time Regulations which found that the NHS was “too reliant” on junior doctors who are often left to work unsupervised on wards overnight and at weekends.
The report also criticised the working hours of consultants who often prefer to work a standard week which inevitably impacts on patient treatment and junior staff training.
Tags: Patient safety
Hah! Not at the Middle Bit of England NHS Trust! We pride ourselves that our death rates are the same during the week as they are during the weekend. I think it’s some kind of target.
Well duh!!!
Multimillion pound media company discovers the obvious and explains it thus
“We need to get to the bottom of what this means. Staffing levels are often lower at weekends, with fewer senior medical staff around, and some specialist services are less available. We believe this may be contributing to the increase in mortality rates on Saturdays and Sundays but we would like to see more research.”
More research done by themselves perchance? Kerchingggg££££££££
No Dr Foster, you are obviously wrong. What actually happens is that at weekends, aliens move into every Hospital and spirit away the patients replacing them with identical clones that are dead.
Can I have £12 million from the DoH as well?
Arse!!
As a Consultant in an acute specialty who works an increasingly busy 1 in 4 on-call rota, I take exception to the final paragraph of the summary of the document
‘Quality & Safety in Healthcare’ above.
Preference for a standard week does not enter into it.
Until Consultant numbers are expanded to allow provision of senior out-of-hours shifts, as opposed to on-call on top of the standard working week, things will not improve.
this “research” simply means that the campaign to get consultants on a 24/7 residential rota is well under way. the next step is to “allow” the surgeons to “opt out” of the ewtd, all in the name of “training” of course (lmao!) and the precedence will then be used to get ALL doctors back on unlimited hours, while freezing their pay as well. neat. that some docs still do not realise that the ewtd is one of their very few friends is astonishing.