Does the Quality of Hospital Treatment Vary by Days of the Week?

Christoph Schwierz, Boris Augurzky () and Jürgen Wasem

No 105, Ruhr Economic Papers from Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universität Dortmund, Universität Duisburg-Essen

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between health outcomes and variations in staffing levels as approximated by admissions on weekdays versus admissions on weekends. Because days of admission are potentially endogenous, we instrument on emergency admissions only, which are reasonably exogenous to the time of admission. Further,we introduce a direct measure for within- diagnosis variation in severity across days of admission to control for the unobservable selection of patients.We find that after controlling for patient heterogeneity and endogeneity of the day of admission there is still a significant variation in mortality rates between weekend and weekday admissions. Patients admitted during the weekend exhibit higher in-hospital mortality rates. We also find signs of premature discharge, as patients with short lengths of stay tend to exhibit higher probability to be readmitted as emergency cases.

Keywords: Hospital quality; weekend effect; inpatient outcomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Date: 2009-05
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