The effect of off-hours hip surgery on patients' outcomes: a RECORD-compliant retrospective, propensity score-matched...

Off-hours working may have negative impacts on the performance of clinicians, leading to possible adverse outcomes of patients. We aimed to explore the impact of off-hours hip surgery on early postoperative outcomes.

All patients who underwent hip surgery between January 2015, and December 2020 in our hospital were evaluated in this retrospective cohort study. We measured in-hospital mortality, some postoperative complications, and some intraoperative prognostic indicators. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to adjust for confounding baseline factors.

We identified 143 patients in the original cohort. After PSM, 266 patients in the on-hours group were matched with 105 similar patients in the off-hours group. Compared with the on-hours group, the off-hours group had more general anesthesia (81.0% vs. 62.4%; RR, 1.30; 95% CI, 1.14 to 1.48; P=0.001), higher amount of intraoperative CRBC (0 U [0-2] vs. 0 U [0-0]; P=0.032) and FFP transfusion (0 mL [0-150] vs. 0 mL [0-0]; P=0.005), higher dosage of intraoperative sufentanil (24.5±14.5 μg vs. 20.7±13.9 μg; P=0.020), higher incidence of postoperative renal dysfunction (13.3% vs. 6.4%; RR, 2.09; 95% CI, 1.07 to 4.08; P=0.029), hypotension (2.9% vs. 0%; P=0.022), and hypoxemia (3.8% vs. 0.4%; RR, 10.13; 95% CI, 1.15 to 89.61; P=0.024), and higher in-hospital mortality (2.9% vs. 0%; P=0.022).

Off-hours hip surgery was associated with adverse early postoperative prognosis, suggesting that more attention should be paid to off-hours hip surgery.