Experts call for more understanding of hospital weekend death risk

Two academics from the University of Warwick say more research is needed to understand why patients are more likely to die in hospital at the weekend. Professor Richard Lilford and Dr Yen-Fu Chen of the University's Warwick Medical School, raised the issue following a study that states hospital weekend death risk is common in several developed countries - not just England Professor Lilford, said: "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. This amounts to about 160 additional deaths in a hospital with 40,000 discharges per year. "But how much of the observed increase results from service failure? And here is the rub, for while a 0.4 percentage point represents a large, potentially scandalous, number of deaths, it is quite a small proportional change". The experts from the University of Warwick wrote an editorial linked to a paper, The Global Comparators project: international comparison of 30-day in-hospital mortality by day of the week, which was published online in BMJ Quality & Safety. The authors of the editorial, The ubiquitous weekend effect: moving past proving it exists to clarifying what causes it, believe that there should be more focus on finding the causes behind the 'weekend effect' rather than just proving its existence. The research found that the heightened risk of death after admission to hospital at the weekend—the so-called 'weekend effect'—is a feature of several developed countries' healthcare systems, and not just a problem for hospitals in England.