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Weekend elective surgery in Ontario comes with greater risk of death


May 27, 2014

Drs. Dan McIsaac and Carl van Walraven have published a study in Medical Care that shows patients who underwent elective surgery between 2002 and 2012 on the weekend were nearly twice as likely to die within 30 days than people who underwent the same procedure during the week. The study, which excluded cardiac surgery, followed 333,334 patients in Ontario after they had an elective operation on a Saturday or Sunday. These findings support a similar study conducted in England. Dr. van Walraven's study does not examine the reasons for these findings. Read the paper.

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