Many people put off going to the doctor or emergency room on weekends or after normal business hours so they can be treated by their own physicians and have access to a full range of specialists. But a new study indicates that those patients might actually have higher hospital survival rates if they are treated when fewer doctors and specialists are on duty.
The study by Harvard Medical School looked into whether having fewer doctors at medical facilities would correlate with higher mortality rates for patients. The research turned up some surprising results – that patients who were treated when relevant specialists were unavailable actually had higher survival rates.
Because in trying to find out why patients suffer more on weekends, researchers found a surprising result: that patients fared significantly better when the relevant specialists were unavailable.
Researchers focused on patients admitted to a hospital with serious heart ailments - including acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, or cardiac arrest – who were tracked to see if they were still alive 30 days later.
Results of the study were consistent, with death rates after heart failure 25 percent when cardiologists were on hand to see the patients. That rate dropped to 17 percent when the cardiologists were not working. Among patients suffering cardiac arrest, the death rate dropped from 70 percent to 59 percent when the heart specialists were unavailable.
“That’s a tremendous reduction in mortality, better than most of the medical interventions that exist to treat these conditions,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Anupam Jena.
The discussion focuses on the possible reasons for the study’s rather surprising findings.
Comments