Worst time to have heart attack in hospital? More deaths at night in US

While there’s no good time to have a heart attack, a new US study finds that patients who have an in-hospital cardiac arrest late at night or on the weekend have a much lower rate of survival than hospitalised patients who experience a cardiac arrest during daytime or evening hours on weekdays.
 
The detection and treatment of cardiac arrests may be less effective at night because of patient-hospital staffing and response factors, the article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association said.
 
“Our findings should be a pretty big wakeup call to urge hospitals to critically evaluate how they are performing resuscitation,” the study’s lead author, Dr Mary Ann Peberdy of the Virginia Commonwealth University Health System in Richmond, told The Associated Press. “It may well be possible that there is a less effective and less efficient response at night.”
 
The suspicion is that patients are monitored less closely or hospital staffing levels are lower during these most dangerous times for an in-hospital heart attack. Only in the emergency room was there no night-or-day difference in survival, according to the study.
 
The research team from Virginia Commonwealth University also speculated that hospital staff, who are fatigued, less experienced or too few in number, could be to blame. Weekends had lower survival rates than weekdays, but the difference wasn’t as pronounced as between late night and daytime hours.