The message is clear. Have your heart attack during normal work hours and on a weekday. After all, we can't really expect huge health systems to change just because it would be good for their so-called customers.....
Gains in acute resuscitation survival for night and weekend in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA) are visible, but not enough to narrow the gap between off-hours and on-hours survival to discharge, a study found.
In 2000-2014, survival to hospital discharge was 16.8% for those presenting during off-hours versus 20.6% during on-hours (P<0.0001), according to Uchenna Ofoma, MD, MS, of Geisinger Health System in Danville, PA, and collaborators of the the American Heart Association Get With the Guidelines-Resuscitation (GWTG-R) investigators.
Over the years, survival to discharge improved for both on-hours (16.0% in 2000 to 25.2% in 2014, P<0.001) and off-hours IHCA (11.9% to 21.9%, P<0.001), but the difference between groups persisted, the authors reported online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
A closer look at when mortality occurred suggested that the difference was not apparent during acute resuscitation, when survival off-hours was comparable to that during on-hours. Instead, the post-resuscitation period was where the disadvantage lay for night and weekend cardiac arrests.