More evidence to support the idea that being admitted* to hospital on a Sunday might be bad for your health comes from a report in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine about a study which looked at all hospital admissions in England between April 2009 & March 2010.
Getting on for 190,000 (1.3%) of these admissions were followed by death (while in hospital) within thirty days; those admitted on a Sunday were 16% more likely to die than were those admitted on Wednesday, though curiously actually being in hospital on Sunday meant you were 8% less likely to die than if you were inthere on a Wednesday – the summary which is all that I have been able to see does not make it clear what happens if you are there both days.
My strong impression, from my own experience & from that of people I know is that a 30 day stay would be very unusual these days.
For me the most startling information in this report however is that 14.2 million people were admitted to hospital in England that year – that is somewhere between one quarter & one third of the population of some 53 million at mid-year.
This must reflect the increasing tendency for multiple admissions – something which is particularly common for the elderly, especially those approaching the end of their life. This does not mean that the hospitals are not doing their job properly, just that those terminally ill are increasingly taken in only to relieve a crisis & then sent home.
The sheer joy I saw on a neighbour’s face as she told me that her husband had come home again (from, I think, his fourth admission since last Easter) testifies to the humanity of this policy.
