If you suffer a personal injury, you may want to get injured on the weekend. According to a recent study, patients who suffer injuries serious enough to be admitted into a hospital's trauma center fare better when they are admitted on the weekend in comparison to being admitted on a weekday. The phenomenon is known as the "weekend effect" and occurs between Friday night and Monday mornings.

Hospital trauma centers are required to have the same number of doctors, nurses and other emergency medical personnel available 24 hours per day and seven days per week. Because of that, researchers who reviewed trauma center information did not expect to see much of a difference between weekends and weekdays. However when researchers completed their work a difference appeared.

Researchers reviewed 90,000 trauma unit patient records over a five year time period from Pennsylvania hospitals. Patients admitted to the trauma units suffered various serious injuries like wounds from a car accident or from a gun. When researchers first reviewed the results a clear difference between times was not observed. No matter the timeframe, around seven out of 1,000 trauma unit patients died. But when the research team factored injury severity and patient health problems a difference emerged. Trauma unit patients were less likely to die between 6:00 p.m. Friday and 9:00 a.m. Monday.

Medical experts say hospitals are fundamentally different during weekend hours. Patients have greater access to hospital resources on the weekend because many areas of the hospital are not servicing patients. For instance, operating rooms and blood banks are freed up and there are generally more hospital beds. Some believe the way trauma units are staffed would be a good but expensive model to replicate in other hospital units.

Source: Reuters, "Injured patients fare slightly better on weekends," Kerry Grens, 3/22/11