Association Between Nighttime Discharge from the Intensive Care Unit and Hospital Mortality: A Multi-Center Retrospective Cohort Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: We aimed to determine the impact of nighttime discharge from the intensive care unit (ICU) to the ward on hospital mortality and readmission rates in consecutive critically ill patients admitted to five Canadian ICUs. We hypothesized that hospital mortality and readmission rates would be higher for patients discharged after hours compared with discharge during the day. METHODS: A multi-center retrospective cohort study was carried out at five hospitals in Edmonton, Canada, between July 2002 and December 2009. Nighttime discharge was defined as discharge from the ICU occurring between 07:00 pm and 07:59 am. Logistic regression analysis was used to explore the associations between nighttime discharge and outcomes. RESULTS: Of 19,622 patients discharged alive from the ICU, 3,505 (17.9%) discharges occurred during nighttime. Nighttime discharge occurred more commonly among medical than surgical patients (19.9% vs. 13.8%, P < 0.001) and among those with more comorbid conditions, compared with daytime discharged patients. Crude hospital mortality (11.8% versus 8.8%, P < 0.001) was greater for nighttime discharged as compared to daytime discharged patients. In a multivariable analysis, after adjustment for comorbidities, diagnosis and source of admission, nighttime discharge remains associated with higher mortality (odds ratio [OR] 1.29; 95% CI, 1.14 to 1.46, P < 0.001). This finding was robust in two sensitivity analyses examining discharges occurring between 00:00 am and 04:59 am (OR 1.28; 1.12-1.47; P < 0.001) and for those who died within 48 h of ICU discharge without readmission (OR 1.24; 1.07-1.42, P = 0.002). There was no difference in ICU readmission for nighttime compared with daytime discharges (7.4% vs. 6.9 %, p = 0.26). However, rates were higher for nighttime discharges in community compared with tertiary hospitals (7.7% vs. 5.7%, P = 0.023). CONCLUSIONS: In a large integrated health region, 1 in 5 ICU patients are discharged at nighttime, a factor with increasing occurrence during our study and shown to be independently associated with higher hospital mortality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".