The junior doctors fighting against a 7-day NHS – which aims to achieve the same care quality throughout the week – rejected research previously highlighting that in the year studied – 2013-14 – there had been 11,000 excess deaths from Friday to Monday. Despite the research being carried out by seven leading doctors and statisticians, including NHS England medical director Sir Bruce Keogh and published in the British Medical Journal, the doctors’ union mounted an impressive propaganda counter-attack rubbishing the research and questioning the validity of the statistics. They claimed that the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt was misrepresenting the data…

This morning completely separate research from Imperial College based on analysis of 1.3 million births over a 2 year period made comparable findings – weekends are associated with a higher rate of complications for births in NHS hospitals.

The rate of perinatal death on weekdays was 6.5 per thousand babies delivered. The rate of perinatal death across babies born on Saturday and Sunday was 7.1 per thousand. In addition to this, the team found that mothers admitted at the weekend had slightly higher rates of infections compared to weekdays (8.7 infections per thousand deliveries, compared to 8.2 per thousand). The authors suggest that if rates of perinatal death and maternal infections were the same across the week as they were on a Tuesday, there would be 770 fewer perinatal deaths a year, and 470 fewer maternal infections. There are around 4,500 perinatal deaths every year in England across 675,000 births. 

The BMA doctor’s union’s reluctance to move to a 7-day NHS is costing lives…