It’s the weekend. You can relax, spend some quality time with your family. But don’t, whatever you do, get ill because if you need to be admitted to a hospital, you’re more likely to die than on a weekday.

Figures commissioned by Body&Soul have revealed that the lack of senior doctors available over the weekend may be leading to a rise in death rates. The data, compiled by the independent health-research organisation Dr Foster, is the first to have charted death rates in the acute hospitals across England according to what day of the week patients are admitted. Professor Dame Carol Black, the president of the Royal College of Physicians, said the situation revealed by the figures was deeply worrying.

The data shows that from Monday to Thursday, mortality rates in hospitals are below 10 per cent; fewer than one person in ten dies. But if you are admitted on a Saturday, your chances of dying rise to 12.5 per cent. There are also significant rises to about 11 per cent on Friday and Sunday. When the figures are adjusted to take account of the fact that weekend patients may be different from weekday patients (for example, they may be more serious admissions because weekend admissions are usually emergencies), the pattern still applies. This adjustment, producing a “standardised mortality ratio”, shows that the worst day of the week to be admitted to hospital is Sunday.

According to Dr Foster, it all adds up to the fact that you are 8 per cent more likely to die if admitted to hospital on a Sunday than in midweek. The statistics suggest, but do not prove, that in some hospitals the rise could be as high as 26 per cent. The figures have been approved by Emeritus Professor Sir Brian Jarman, the senior research investigator at the division of health sciences, Imperial College, London.

He believes that the most credible explanation for the increase is the lack of doctors available at weekends. “When you look at other studies, it’s certainly true that the best predictor of high standardised mortality ratios is a low number of doctors per bed,” he says.

The only other study looking at how mortality rates in hospitals change at the weekend, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, came to the same conclusion: lower levels of staff at weekends in Canadian hospitals increased the risk of death among patients with some life-threatening disorders.

To an outsider it seems shocking that a mere quirk of when we get ill should have a direct impact on whether we live or die. What tends to happen in English hospitals — and has done for decades — is that most hospital doctors, having worked long hours in clinics during the week, take the weekend off. It’s left to junior doctors to take over, usually with senior doctors (consultants) “on call” in case of emergencies.

It’s not a subject that has received much attention in the past, partly because the “on call” system has been part of the NHS for so long and because everyone knows that there aren’t enough doctors to go around. But for patients it’s a matter of concern. According to Michael Summers, the chairman of the Patients Association, many patients phone the association’s helpline anxious about weekend hospital care. “They say they were in hospital, something went wrong and they were left with a junior doctor saying, ‘Sorry, we can’t get a consultant at the weekend.’ Sometimes they try to get an on-call consultant, and just can’t contact them,” he says.

It was my own family’s worrying experience during a weekend admission that led me to ask Dr Foster if there might be a national problem. My mother-in-law has suffered from cancer for five years and has received excellent treatment from the Royal Marsden Hospital. In a recent course of chemotherapy her one functioning kidney failed. Diagnosing this quickly, the Marsden said she needed urgent treatment and scans , but they had no beds, so arranged for her to be admitted to her local hospital, Barnet. Because it was late on a Friday, she had to be admitted via the accident and emergency department. Though in urgent need of intravenous fluids, she waited for treatment, and a bed, much of the night.

When my wife arrived next morning she found that the fluids drip had failed in the night and no one had fixed it. Her mum was in pain and feeling sick from her chemotherapy, but she was not allowed any of her prescribed tablets until authorised by a doctor. The drip had to be fixed up by a doctor, so that would also have to wait. So when could she expect to see a doctor? Monday, my wife was told. The nurses said they were doing their best to call someone but there was just one medical team on duty for the whole of the hospital. In desperation, my wife rang the Marsden to see if they could chivvy the Barnet doctors. It worked. Within an hour the doctors arrived, changed the drip, ordered tests and gave the right medication.

But my wife is convinced that her mother would have died if she hadn’t been so pushy. She also wonders what happened to the patients who weren’t attended to while the doctors were with her mum. Barnet Hospital has 450 beds.

The Dr Foster figures don’t show that Barnet Hospital is significantly different from any other English hospital in its weekend mortality rates; indeed, the weekend rise shows a remarkable consistency across England. There are one or two hospitals with steeper increases in weekend mortality (Barnet is not one of them), but statisticians say they cannot be singled out because the numbers involved are not high enough to be statistically significant.

Barnet Hospital points out that hospitals at weekends are different from during the week. “In the week there’s a lot of elective and outpatient activity,” says Nick Samuels, the hospital’s communications director. “At weekends, the only patients are emergencies, so you would have a slimmer staff because activity is reduced.

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