In the Christmas issue of the BMJ, doctors from Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital in the UK reported a retrospective review of all children aged 7–15 who attended the emergency department with musculoskeletal injuries over the summer months of a three‐year period (http://tinyurl.com/bmpnm). Weekend admissions were counted as those occurring between 8 am on Saturday and 8 am on Monday. The researchers compared the numbers of admissions on these weekends in June 2003 and July 2005 when the two most recent Harry Potter books—The order of the phoenix and The half‐blood prince—with those for the surrounding summer weekends and those dates in previous years. Met Office data were also studied and used to adjust for weather as a confounding variable if necessary. The mean weekend attendance rates to the emergency department in June and July between 2003 and 2005 for children aged 7–15 years during control weekends was 67.4 (SD 10.4). For the two intervention weekends—when the Harry Potter books were published—the attendance rates were 36 and 37 (mean 36.5, SD 0.7). This represented a significant decrease in attendances on the intervention weekends, as both are greater than two SD from the mean control attendance rate and an unpaired t test gives a t value of 14.2 (p < 0.0001). At no other point during the three‐year surveillance period was attendance that low.
Contributed by Mima Cattan and others.