mortality

Weekend admission is associated with higher in-hospital mortality than weekday admission. Whether providing enhanced weekend staffing for acute medical inpatient services reduces mortality or length of stay is unknown.

Objectives: To determine if a risk score developed in hospitalised older adults in the UK in 1962 is correlated with other measures of health and if this risk score predicts death or institutionalisation in community-living older adults.

Mortality among emergency medical admissions to hospital is higher for admissions at the weekend than on weekdays; this also holds true for certain specific conditions. However, it is unknown whether that effect is limited to weekends. This study calculated mortality in emergency medical admissions for each day of the week, and compared mortality at weekends with weekdays, at nights with days, and in all out-of-hours periods with in-hours in a UK district general hospital.

General paralysis of the insane (GPI) was one of the most devastating diseases observed in British psychiatry during the century after 1840, in terms of the high number and type of patients diagnosed, the severity of its symptoms and, above all, its utterly hopeless prognosis. With particular reference to the physicians and patients of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, this article explores the diagnostic process and the social and medical significance of the ‘death sentence’ that accompanied the GPI diagnosis.