Mortality in trauma patients admitted during, before, and after national academic emergency medicine and trauma surgery meeting dates in Japan

Annually, many physicians attend national academic meetings. While participating in these meetings can have a positive impact on daily medical practice, attendance may result in reduced medical staffing during the meeting dates. We sought to examine whether there were differences in mortality after trauma among patients admitted to the hospital during, before, and after meeting dates. Using the Japan Trauma Data Bank, we analyzed in-hospital mortality in patients with traumatic injury admitted to the hospital from 2004 to 2015 during the dates of two national academic meetings - the Japanese Association for Acute Medicine (JAAM) and the Japanese Association for the Surgery of Trauma (JAST). We compared the data with that of patients admitted with trauma during identical weekdays in the weeks before and after the meetings, respectively. We used multiple logistic regression analysis to compare outcomes among the three groups. A total of 7,491 patients were included in our analyses, with 2,481, 2,492, and 2,518 patients in the during, before, and after meeting dates groups, respectively; their mortality rates were 7.3%, 8.0%, and 8.5%, respectively. After adjusting for covariates, no significant differences in in-hospital mortality were found among the three groups (adjusted odds ratio [95% CI] of the before meeting dates and after meeting dates groups; 1.18 [0.89-1.56] and 1.23 [0.93-1.63], respectively, with the during meeting dates group as the reference category). No significant differences in in-hospital mortality were found among trauma patients admitted during, before, and after the JAAM and JAST meeting dates.