Day of Admission Dictates Length of Stay for Heart Failure

Patients admitted to a hospital on Thursdays or Fridays have longer stays, study found

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter

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WEDNESDAY, May 21 (HealthDay News) -- Heart failure patients admitted to the hospital on Thursdays or Fridays have longer hospital stays than those admitted on other days of the week, a new report found.

Those admitted on Tuesdays have the shortest stays.

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Unlike heart attack patients, however, the day of admission doesn't seem to effect death rates for heart failure patients, according to the report, published in a new journal, Circulation: Heart Failure, which debuts this week.

"The day of the week appeared to significantly influence whether a [heart failure] patient would be discharged," said study lead author Dr. Gregg D. Fonarow, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, David Geffen School of Medicine. "There were far fewer discharges over weekends and specifically on Sundays."

The findings could lead to changes in hospital procedures, such as staffing schedules, which could lead to shorter hospital stays and reduced costs, the authors said.

Previous studies had found that heart attack patients admitted to a hospital on weekends were more likely to die than those admitted on weekdays. "On weekends, there tend to be less physicians and nurses and other health personnel, less senior individuals and supervisors," Fonarow explained. "Often physicians covering many patients were not involved in directly admitting those patients."

Heart failure -- the heart's inability to pump sufficient amounts of blood -- is one of the leading reasons for hospitalizations (at least 3.6 million annually) in the United States. But until the new study, no review had been done to see if the day of admission affected outcomes, the study authors said.

Fonarow and his colleagues looked at data for a sample of 48,612 heart failure patients admitted to 259 hospitals across the United States. While death rates were similar for all seven days of the week, length of hospital stays differed from 5.39 days for those admitted on Tuesdays to 5.88 days for those admitted on Fridays.

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