Erschienen in:
01.05.2004 | Editorial
Variation in intensive care unit outcomes by day of week: no weak-end
verfasst von:
Chaim M. Bell, Damon C. Scales
Erschienen in:
Intensive Care Medicine
|
Ausgabe 5/2004
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Excerpt
An essential feature of high quality care relates to the consistency with which it is provided to patients. This concept has been the motivation behind several proposed quality indicators, such as measuring the proportion of critically ill patients who receive appropriate thromboembolic prophylaxis or stress ulcer prophylaxis [
1]. However, similar patients may receive dissimilar hospital care and have dissimilar patient outcomes depending on the time of day or day of the week that care is provided [
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7]. The differential staffing of health care workers in hospitals at different times of the day or week is most often blamed in these circumstances. Indeed, the current uneven staffing on weekends, compared to weekdays (the “weekend effect”), is in contradistinction to practices in other industries with large infrastructure (such as hotels and airlines) that strive for identical levels of service at all times [
8,
9]. …