Hospitals are much more dangerous places at the weekend. You’re more likely to die in hospital if you’re admitted on a Saturday or Sunday than if you’d come in on a weekday.
It’s a problem experienced by hospitals all around the world as senior staff take the weekend off, leaving the junior doctors in charge.
A major study involving more than 55 million patients in hospitals in many countries has discovered that the patient admitted at the weekend is up to 17 per cent more likely to die.
Researchers from Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan said that the alarming difference could either be because standard of care fell at the weekends, or that patients who were severely ill were more likely to be admitted then.
But as the pattern is similar around the world, the researchers concluded that the level of care was the obvious reason.
(Source: Proceedings of the European Society of Anaesthesiology, May 31, 2014)
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