A review of statistics pertaining to deaths in intensive care wards (ICUs) across 41 Australian hospitals have revealed the ‘peak time’ for hospital deaths --- Over-nights and weekends!

According to the data, pertaining to an 8-year period up to 2008, the mortality rate for patients who were admitted to hospitals’ ICU during the day was 14 percent; while that for patients admitted after regular working hours was 17 percent.

Furthermore, the gap between the mortality rates was much bigger for patients admitted during the week and those admitted on weekends – the respective figures being 14 percent and 20 percent.

Elaborating on the findings, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, Dr Deepak Bhonagiri - an intensivist and lecturer in Anaesthesia Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine at Sydney's Liverpool Hospital - said that the data clearly indicates that people generally suffer more serious injuries outside of business hours. As such, ICUs have to handle more difficult cases during overnights and weekends.

However, since this explanation does not specifically account for the ‘peak times’ for hospitals deaths, especially when the extra deaths were mostly seen in patients who had undergone ‘elective’ surgery rather than ‘emergency’ surgery, further research is required to throw more light on the differences in the patient mortality rates.