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Whats New in the
Patient Safety World
November 2022
Timing Is
Everything
Weve done lots of columns on the effect of time of day on your surgery and impact of day of the week on patient outcomes. But another important example was just published. Diestre and colleagues (Diestre 2022) reported on The Friday Effect. They found that safety alerts issued by health regulators about new drug-related side effects are not equally effective. Safety alerts announced on Fridays are less broadly diffused: they are shared 34% less on social media, mentioned in 23% to 66% fewer news articles, and are 12% to 51% less likely to receive any news coverage at all. They found that moving a Friday alert to any other weekday would reduce all drug-related side effects by 9% to 12%, serious drug-related complications by 6% to 15%, and drug-related deaths by 22% to 36%.
They note that this problem is particularly important because Friday was the most frequent weekday for safety alert announcements from 1999 to 2016. And that is probably not a random phenomenon. They go on to show that firms that lobbied the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the past are 49% to 56% more likely to have safety alerts announced on Fridays. For companies that did not lobby the FDA, alerts were more evenly spread throughout the work week, with Thursdays equally as likely as Fridays, and Tuesdays and Wednesdays close behind.
Sound familiar? Politicians typically release bad news on Friday evenings, knowing it will get less attention over the weekend and might disappear from the news cycle. Sounds like Big Pharma has the same media consultants!
Some of our previous columns on the weekend effect:
· February 26, 2008 Nightmares .The Hospital at Night
· December 15, 2009 The Weekend Effect
· July 20, 2010 More on the Weekend Effect/After-Hours Effect
· October 2008 Hospital at Night Project
· September 2009 After-Hours Surgery Is There a Downside?
· December 21, 2010 More Bad News About Off-Hours Care
·
June
2011 Another Study on Dangers of Weekend
Admissions
·
September
2011 Add COPD to Perilous Weekends
·
August
2012 More on the Weekend Effect
·
June
2013 Oh No! Not Fridays Too!
·
November
2013 The Weekend Effect: Not One Simple Answer
·
August
2014 The Weekend Effect in Pediatric Surgery
·
October
2014 What Time of Day Do You Want Your Surgery?
·
December
2014 Another Procedure to Avoid Late in the Day or
on Weekends
·
January
2015 Emergency Surgery Also Very Costly
·
May 2015
HACs and the Weekend Effect
·
August
2015 More Stats on the Weekend Effect
·
September
2015 Surgery Previous Night Does Not Impact
Attending Surgeon Next Day
·
February
23, 2016 Weekend
Effect Solutions?
·
June
2016 Weekend
Effect Challenged
·
October
4, 2016 More
on After-Hours Surgery
·
July 25,
2017 Can
We Influence the Weekend Effect?
·
August
15, 2017 Delayed
Emergency Surgery and Mortality Risk
·
September
2020 Care
Processes and the Weekend Effect
·
October
13, 2020 Night-Time Surgery
·
December
15, 2020 Our Perennial Pre-Holiday
Warning: Be Careful Out There!
·
May 2022
Another
Weekend Effect Phenomenon
Some of our previous columns on after-hours surgery:
· September 2009 After-Hours Surgery Is There a Downside?
·
October
2014 What Time of Day Do You Want Your Surgery?
·
January
2015 Emergency Surgery Also Very Costly
·
September
2015 Surgery Previous Night Does Not Impact
Attending Surgeon Next Day
·
October
4, 2016 More
on After-Hours Surgery
·
August
15, 2017 Delayed
Emergency Surgery and Mortality Risk
·
October
24, 2017 Neurosurgery
and Time of Day
·
December
2019 Surgeon
On-Call Shifts
·
October
13, 2020 Night-Time Surgery
References:
Diestre L, Barber B, Santalσ J. The Friday Effect: Firm Lobbying, the Timing of Drug Safety Alerts, and Drug Side Effects. Management Science 2020; 66(8): 3677-3698
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2019.3386
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