TY - JOUR T1 - Moving beyond the weekend effect: how can we best target interventions to improve patient care? JF - BMJ Quality & Safety JO - BMJ Qual Saf DO - 10.1136/bmjqs-2020-012620 SP - bmjqs-2020-012620 AU - Perla J Marang-van de Mheen AU - Charles Vincent Y1 - 2021/02/11 UR - http://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/early/2021/02/10/bmjqs-2020-012620.abstract N2 - Clear evidence for a weekend effect was first demonstrated by Bell and Redelmeier1 who examined 3.8 million emergency admissions between 1988 and 1997 in an acute care hospital in Ontario. They had noted that staffing levels were lower in acute care hospitals at weekends and hypothesised that this might lead to poorer care and higher mortality. To test this hypothesis, they identified three conditions (ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm, acute epiglottitis and pulmonary embolism) for which lower staffing on admission was expected to have consequences in outcomes, as well as three control conditions for which this would not be the case. In addition, they conducted an analysis without a prespecified hypothesis, examining the 100 conditions responsible for most deaths. After adjustment for illness severity, they found higher mortality for conditions expected to be affected by lower staffing and no increase for control conditions. From the 100 medical conditions examined, 23 had significantly increased mortality risk for weekend admissions. These two sets of findings provided strong evidence for a weekend effect, suggesting that for some conditions lower staffing on admission affected standards of care and thereby patient outcomes.Since then, dozens of studies of the weekend effect have been conducted, mostly in the UK and the USA.2 In Britain, the issue became much more high profile after an intervention in 2015 by the Secretary of State who suggested that 11 000 patients were unnecessarily dying at the weekend.3 4 This claim was challenged at the time,5 and many pointed out that the National Health Service (NHS) was already a 7-day service.6 7 However, concern about the weekend led eventually to the introduction of ‘7 day services’ in the NHS in England. A new set of 10 clinical standards was introduced to reduce differences between weekend and weekday services, including increased … ER -