‘The weekend effect’: If you’re planning surgery, doctors say you should think twice about Fridays

Everybody’s working for the weekend, which, according to a new study, is incidentally the worst time of the week to undergo surgery. A paper published in the JAMA Network on March 4, 2025, concludes that patients experience worse outcomes during the weekends, as compared to weekdays. This phenomenon is known as the “weekend effect” and the study, which examined 429,691 patients in Ontario, Canada, determined that people whose surgeries began directly before the weekend “experienced a statistically significant increase in the composite outcome of death, complications, and readmissions at 30 days, 90 days, and 1 year.”

The study looked at 25 common surgeries across a range of surgical specialties, and attributed its findings to understaffing, seniority — junior surgeons are more likely to work weekends and have fewer experienced colleagues and specialists to lean on — decreased access to tests and scans, and less familiarity with the patients they’re treating. 

Over on Reddit, the response to this news was grim: “This is a great article to have encountered right before my wife’s Saturday surgery,” writes u/LookIPickedAUsername.

“Almost did me in,” writes u/jcatleather. “Bled out after tonsillectomy and they had no staff for surgery and they wanted me to wait until Monday for repair until I ralfed a few quarts of blood all over the poor triage nurse. They had to call my surgeon back from her vacation to glue me back together.”

Who is to blame for the ‘weekend effect’?

Redditors were not surprised by this news. @aperdra writes that his dad “recently had 3 cardiovascular surgeries, following which he developed “hospital pneumonia” and was put on end of life care. The palliative care team were on skeleton crew… I remember saying “what? Don’t people die at the weekend?”

But some medical professionals pushed back at the idea that, as @bucciryan says, the sole culprit is hospitals choosing “to reduce cost by having less staff. Ya know. For money.”

@Mikejg23 calls this “partially true,” writing “The other part of this equation is that people will generally only work a set number of weekends. Doctors, surgeons, PAs, nurses etc all need weekends off.” And @endosurgery says that many surgeons won’t operate during the night if they don’t have to. “There’s less staff due to need. Also, emergencies are not predictable and can be low volume in many hospitals. Therefore low staff.”

But another doctor weighed in on the thread. “As a doctor, I am scared shitless for my patients on the weekend,” writes u/South_Sense_1363. “I work nightshift and will keep extra eyes on all my admissions from the night before going into the weekend. I put in extra things like morning labs for the weekend nights , q4 vital checks, ect. This is with years of experience and my patients have been doing remarkably better. Definitely skipped meals to make this happen and work beyond my hours, the hospital finance people don’t care to pay me for that.”

Higher maternal mortality rates have also been linked to the ‘weekend effect’

A 2019 study published in the National Library of Medicine found a link between higher mortality rates and women who checked into hospitals on weekends. The study analyzed data taken from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics in the United States over a ten-year period (between 2004 and 2014).

The study determined that during that time, “2,061 maternal deaths occurred on weekends and 5,510 deaths on weekdays,” and noted there was also a correlation between weekends and an increase in fetal mortality rates. The study concluded by saying there was a “significant increase in the U.S. MMR and stillbirth delivery on weekends.”

When else is a bad time to go to the hospital?

Most people would say any day is a bad day to go under the knife, but Reddit’s medically-adjacent users are sharing other specific days to try to avoid. 

@Xdaveyy1775 writes that they are a surgical tech, and recommends that people get surgery on weekdays before 2 pm. “Around 2pm is usually a major shift change over to the night/evening crew… my shift crosses over the major shift change and it’s literally like a switch gets flipped and everything comes to a screeching halt. Entire nursing teams will get switched out mid-surgery.” 

And @01d_n_p33v3d says his wife worked at a “major Maryland hospital” scheduling nurses. He says she “told me to avoid surgery around July 4th as well, because that was when the crop of just graduated interns and new residents started work.”

@GSV_CARGO_CULT adds that his brother-in-law works with medical data and recommends that you don’t want doctors looking at “your Xray or MRI or whatever right before the end of their shift, because they’ll put like 50% effort into your diagnosis.”

All in all, this news requires an edit to Loverboy’s song: Now everybody’s working to not get sick for the weekend.

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