A study says you're more
likely to die if you're discharged during festive times.
By Sara
Chodosh December 11, 2018
Everyone's a little more
lax during the holidays. For most of us, that just means gaining a little weight or slacking off a bit in
the office. But it turns out being less regimented around Christmas and New
Year's might literally be deadly for some people.
This shouldn't really come
as a shock to any of us. It's a well-documented fact that patients admitted to the hospital on a
weekend have a higher mortality rate
than those whose emergencies happen to fall on a weekday, which experts have
attributed to understaffing and delayed test results. A group of doctors and
researchers in Toronto wondered if a similar phenomenon might apply to the
holiday season.
A brief editorial note that
this particular study is in the annual British Medical Journal Christmas issue,
a special volume dedicated to weird, funny, or seasonal studies. They’re all
still peer-reviewed and held up to scrutiny, but they’re also supposed to be
more like intriguing little experiments than serious papers. And now we
continue…
There are lots of reasons
that the holiday season might bring more death
and havoc than usual. For starters, most of us don't want to spend
these special days sitting in doctors' offices. People who are discharged from
the hospital are often supposed to have a follow-up appointment both to ask
about any issues and so the physician can ensure the patient is improving. If
you're let out on December 23 and you're supposed to come back in a week, are
you really going to schedule your appointment right before New Year's Eve?
You'll probably delay it. Maybe the staffer who was supposed to call to
schedule it won't even get around to contacting you until later than normal. On
an individual level, these little delays probably won't matter—this study is
not proof that someone who gets sick or hurt on Christmas will definitely fare
worse than at other times of year. But as these researchers found out, these
minute differences do add up across a population.
In their study, they found that for every 100,000
people treated during the two-week holiday season that spans Christmas and New
Years, there are approximately 23 deaths, 188 re-hospitalizations, and 483 ER
visits that can be chalked up to what they call the "Christmas
effect." They figured this out by analyzing data collected from Ontario
hospitals between 2002 and 2016, comparing the holiday season to other two-week
periods in November and January that weren't plagued by Christmas cheer. The
people released at the end of December were more likely to die or to be
readmitted to the hospital in the month following their discharge. Their
increased risk was only about 14 percent—but again, that small percentage adds
up.
The researchers speculate
about a number of reasons that holiday festivities might interfere with health.
Patients might have less access to non-emergency care, for one, or they might
have trouble actually booking an appointment with the necessary physician—they
take time off too, you know. And if the meeting is inconvenient for the doctor
or the patient (or both), that appointment is likely to get pushed back,
perhaps long enough for a problem to arise. On top of all this, patients might
not get the best care as they leave the hospital in the first place. Nurses in
charge of giving instructions on how and when to take medication or teaching a
patient how to dress a wound may slip up when they’re short-staffed and pressed
for time.
As much as we'd like to
believe that the people in charge of our care—ourselves included—will always do
their absolute best job, we're all human. Every healthcare worker has made a
mistake, just like every one of us has failed to get to the dentist early or
been late with our annual physical. Life happens. And when circumstances stack
up to affect thousands or millions of patients, like during the holidays or on the day when new doctors begin their
jobs, there's probably going to be a slight downturn in care. Heck,
we even see a health effect from entire countries missing an hour of
sleep during daylight savings.
None of it is a reason to
freak out. It’s just a timely reminder to be vigilant about your health. No one
is going to care more about your body and its well-being than you are—so make
sure it's taken care of.
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