Implications for practice and research

• Women giving birth at night may be a higher risk population, reinforcing the need for regular observations to detect morbidities early.

• Further research is needed taking into account the time of severe morbidity events and their underlying causes in order to investigate variation in outcomes by the time of day.

Context

There is increasing interest worldwide, particularly in high-resource countries, in assessing variation in the outcomes of maternity care according to the time of day or day of the week. Such analyses are usually intended to examine the impact of variation in staffing levels or capacity, with the aim …