A new study found that scheduling a surgery in the afternoon, on the weekend and during the month of February increases one's likelihood of dying by up to 22 percent.

Dr. Felix Kork and Prof. Claudia Spies of the Charite-University Medicine in Berlin, Germany and their colleagues reviewed surgery data between 2006 and 2011 obtained from two university hospitals involving 218,758 patients.

After careful analysis, the researchers created recurring patterns related to deaths that occurred inside the hospital.

The researchers observed variations on the numbers of deaths during certain times of the day, weekends and months. They found out that 21 percent of the patients who underwent surgery during the afternoon died. 22 percent for those scheduled over the weekend passed away.

The research team recommended patients to schedule their surgeries during morning or night between Mondays to Fridays, but not in the month of February. The data revealed that February showed the highest risk of death at 16 percent compared to other months.

The researchers planned to continue their study to determine potential causes for the variations.

"Several factors may have influenced this outcome. For example, it may be that standard of care differs throughout the day and between weekdays and weekends. Although we controlled for risk factors including emergency surgery in our study, it may very well be that the patients treated in the afternoon and on the weekends were more severely ill. We need more data to draw conclusions regarding seasonal variation in postoperative outcome," the researchers wrote in a press release.

The findings of the study would pave the way for the improvement of the quality of service in the university hospital and could also be adapted by other hospitals.

The study seemed to echo the results of an earlier study conducted by researchers based in U.K showing that patients brought to the hospital during weekend lower their chance of survival by 27 percent due to fewer senior staff on duty and unavailability of machines for diagnostic testing.

The Berlin researchers presented the results of the study at the annual meeting of the European Society of Anaesthesiology.