Night Time Can Be A Scary Place at Many Hospitals
Scary statistics show that patients entering or staying in hospitals at night are victims of a little-known medical world where doctors, nurses and hospitals make mistakes that kill people.
Readers Digest reports that a 2005 study of 3.3 million births in California found that babies born late at night were 16 percent more likely to die than those born in the daytime. Other recent research found that patients going into cardiac arrest at night were more likely to die. In a review of pharmacy and patient records, significantly more medication errors were made at night. Daytime deaths can also be attributed to nighttime hospital errors: an analysis of 15 pediatric intensive care units found that kids admitted to the units at night were more likely to die within 48 hours.
Weekends can also be dangerous: a long-term study released in March showed that heart attack victims admitted to New Jersey hospitals on the weekend were less likely to receive lifesaving angioplasty treatment, and more likely to die within a month. Another key reason: “skeleton” crews. You're not likely to see many top surgeons and specialists wandering around hospital hallways at four in the morning. And it's not just doctors who are home sleeping. "At night you have fewer resources in mental health, social services, directors and administrators," says Michelle Coner, a registered nurse at the Codman Square Health Center in Boston. "There are just fewer people to bounce things off."
At night, hospitals schedule fewer people with less experience. Since workers with seniority tend to get first dibs on the daytime positions, the night shift is often staffed with “newbies” -- right down to the nursing assistants and lab technicians. More often than not, on-the-job training happens in the middle of the night.
Unfortunately, if you get sick at night, you might just be the “guinea pig.”