Study: Hospital Patients Still More Likely To Die On Weekends

By Michael Nedelman, CNN (CNN) — Doctors call it the “weekend effect.” Patients in the hospital are more likely to die off-hours — whether it’s due to a brain bleed, a heart attack or a clot in the lungs. New research on cardiac arrest in the hospital now asks: Has the “weekend effect” changed in recent years, as treatment has gotten better? “We know that survival trends have improved in past decade or so,” said Dr. Uchenna Ofoma, assistant professor of medicine at Temple University and a critical care physician at Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pennsylvania. “The question now becomes … what happens to the disparities? Has it remained the same? Is it narrowing?” Ten years after a 2008 study showed lower survival rates during nights and weekends for in-hospital cardiac arrest, Ofoma published a new study this week in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The new study builds on that previous research, finding that treatment has indeed gotten better, but we haven’t closed the nights-and-weekends gap. Between 2000 and 2014, weekday survival jumped from 16% to 25.2%, while weekend and weeknight survival rose from 11.9% to 21.9%, according to the new study’s risk-adjusted numbers. There was no significant change in the gap between weekday and off-hours survival, the study said. About half of patients in the study — more than 150,000 patients from 470 US hospitals — ex...
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