What have we learnt after 15 years of research into the weekend effect'?

Abstract

Untangling the evidence for the weekend effect has proven extremely difficult, and it therefore comes as no surprise that it has generated controversy in some settings. Messy, conflicting evidence is, however, less the exception than the norm when it comes to questions about healthcare quality, and meaningful progress can be made even for these knotty types of problems through the use of quality improvement methods. Actively looking for temporal variation in quality of care, patient safety and outcomes should help ensure that potentially important, systematic inequalities in quality do not persist unnoticed.