Weekend and Weekday Hospital Admission Patterns

Using MEDLINE, CINAHL, HMIC, EMBASE, EThOS, CPCI and the Cochrane Library without language restriction, we limited the search to year 2000 onwards to ensure that evidence reasonably reflected contemporary health organisation and practice. Our iterative search strategy combined terms relating to ‘weekend/weekday’ or ‘out-of-hours’ with terms relating to ‘hospital admissions’. Terminology used in MEDLINE is shown in online supplementary appendix 1 of the published protocol.15 (link)
Records were imported into EndNote (Thomson Reuters) and de-duplicated. The initial search in April 2015 was updated with a MEDLINE search in May 2016 and again in November 2017 as our screening of the initial search identified few (1/28) relevant publications uniquely in other databases. We used reference chaining for completeness. Additional searches were undertaken specifically for framework synthesis, described in the companion paper.