It turns out that the rumor that 'surgery on the weekend makes you more likely to die' is true
Doctors are human, so if they are preoccupied with weekend plans and leisure plans, they may neglect their work, and when holidays approach, doctors may take time off, resulting in a shortage of skilled personnel. A new study examining the 'weekend effect,' which suggests that patients who receive treatment on weekends tend to have poorer outcomes, found that patients who had surgery on a Friday or just before a long holiday had a significantly worse prognosis than those who had surgery at the beginning of the week.
Postoperative Outcomes Following Preweekend Surgery | Surgery | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network
Do weekends really affect surgical outcomes?
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-03-weekends-affect-surgical-outcomes.html
In this study, published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, a medical journal published by the American Medical Association, a research team of doctors from multiple hospitals, mainly in Canada, investigated the postoperative progress of 429,691 patients who underwent surgical procedures in Ontario, Canada between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2019.
They divided the surgery dates into 'before the weekend' - Friday or just before a long holiday - and 'after the weekend' - Monday or the day after a long holiday - and evaluated short-term (30 days after surgery), medium-term (90 days after surgery), and long-term (1 year after surgery) outcomes. They found that patients who had surgery before the weekend were significantly more likely to suffer complications, be re-admitted to hospital, or die.
Specifically, patients who underwent surgery before the weekend were 5 to 6 percent more likely to experience death, complications, or readmission than those after the weekend, regardless of the time period evaluated. The risk of death worsened over time, increasing by 9 percent at 30 days, 10 percent at 90 days, and 12 percent at one year.
Analyses of surgical procedures have shown that patients with scheduled or non-urgent surgeries undergoing surgery before the weekend tend to have poorer outcomes, so if you have a choice about when to have your surgery, it may be better to do it on a Monday or after a long weekend.
On the other hand, it was also found that emergency surgery performed before the weekend had slightly better outcomes than after the weekend. In other words, if the urgency was high, the outcome was worse after the weekend. This is likely due to cases where emergency surgery could not be performed before the weekend and was postponed until after the weekend, so the researchers point out that 'immediate intervention is beneficial for patients who visit the hospital urgently.'
The trends in the doctors who performed the surgery also differed slightly depending on the timing of the surgery: the median age of surgeons who performed before the weekend was 47 years old, compared to 48 years old after the weekend. Also, the median number of years they had been in practice was 14 years before the weekend, compared to 17 years after the weekend. In other words, doctors who performed after the weekend tended to be slightly more experienced.
While it's not yet clear why patients are more likely to die when they have surgery on a Friday, the findings are broadly consistent with other similar studies of the weekend effect.
'The widespread observation of the weekend effect across multiple health systems in different countries suggests that its causes are diverse, likely due in part to system-level factors such as staffing, service availability, and barriers to care coordination,' the team wrote in their paper.
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in Science, Posted by log1l_ks