Oversee the work of Austrian hospitals have confirmed the so-called “weekend effect” – people who are in intensive care at the weekend, do die more often than other patients.
“Our study shows that patients admitted to hospital at the weekend are far more likely to die than other patients. This effect should be considered and physicians, and politicians, as it is inconceivable that in the 21st century, the time of hitting a person in the hospital affects the probability of its survival,” said Paul Zajic from the Medical University of Graz (Austria).
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In recent years, scientists are actively debating about the existence of so-called “weekend effect” – a sharp increase in mortality among patients clinics on Saturday and Sunday. It is not clear whether this effect, as recent studies on this topic often led to opposite conclusions.
Zajic and his colleagues have confirmed that the “weekend effect” still exists and find out why other scholars came to different conclusions after analyzing the statistics collected by the health authorities of Austria from 2012 to 2015. During this time, as scholars have noted, in the intensive care departments of hospitals were about 167 thousand patients, some of whom died in hospitals.
Patients are indeed less likely to have died in hospitals during the weekend, if they get there on weekdays. Patients who are in intensive care on Saturday or Sunday, have died more often than those people who were in the intensive care unit on weekdays.
It was expressed that people were dying by approximately 7-15% less on Saturday and Sunday than on weekdays, if they initially assisted in working days, but they died between 11 and 15% more if they came to the hospital on Saturday and Sunday.
According to Zaika, due to the fact that during the weekend the doctors are less likely to hold some of the more complex types of therapies and non-trivial surgery, putting them on weekdays, which may explain why patients die more often in the next days and weeks.
In addition, on weekends in hospitals tend to get patients in more serious condition than in the working days, which can also affect the statistics of mortality and probability of death. All this, scientists believe, should be considered by government and the competent authorities in the management of the daily routine in medical institutions.
