I do not personally understand how healthcare — the fundamental preservation of human life — allows for this kind of risk exposure. Many programmers in the tech community know that half of the listed time (12 hours) of solid work is enough to start to slow your decision-making and reasoning ability. When peoples LIVES are in the hands of junior doctors who are essentially drunk off'f sleep deprivation[0], how can we trust the system to to its job?<p>Why are the incentives continuing to be placed in the wrong areas? When will we remedy this properly?<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1739867/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1739867/</a>
Someone ought to do a study on what the effects truly are.<p>Take a group of hospitals, randomly assign them to "continue insane hours for residents", "40-hour work-weeks and no more than 12-hour shifts" and maybe a third group somewhere in between. Run it for two years, and see what the effect on patients and doctors actually is.<p>Then will come the hard questions: if we see that these insane hours are literally killing patients, surely then it will make sense to end this madness?
This doesn't return things to the pre-duty-hours era. However, it does roll back specific limits that were created for first year residents (interns). When eventually studied, the interpretation that most of us had was that there is not a significant difference in patient care with these shorter hours. This is due to, we think, the tradeoff between a tired doctor who knows your current condition well, and better rested doctors who are handing off responsibility more often.
love the orwellian way this is spun as to how it is letting doctors do another 4 hours on top of the current pathetic 20. no @%^@%#$ way i'd let myself be diagnosed by someone 23 hours into their shift, let alone do a procedure requiring basic hand eye co-ordination.
My father is a urologist trained at McGill in its heyday back in the 60's, and they often worked much longer shifts than 24 hours. It was part of the training to be working while sleep deprived. In real life, a doctor often has to take calls in the middle of the night, and it was important for the medical school to either train students to be able to work under such conditions or be failed out if they couldn't hack it.<p>Mind you, they also had other traditions like working with cadavers with their bare hands only, out of respect for the people who had donated their own bodies.<p>Back then, it was expected that 2/3rds of students would end up failing out. Not just from long shifts, but the program was designed to be that challenging so as to weed out many people, to ensure that only the best would succeed. Nowadays, medical schools perceive the dollars spent training a medical student as too great of an investment, and want all their students graduate so failures are uncommon. Now once accepted, a student has pretty much made it even though the acceptance criteria is quite distanced from how they actually perform as a medical doctor. This potentially results in less qualified individuals becoming licensed.
These residents can't even safely drive home after a 24-hour shift, but they're perfectly fine to practice medicine on others. The "studies" say that, so it must be true, right?
> said the change will enhance patient safety because there will be fewer handoffs from doctor to doctor. It also said the longer shifts will improve the new doctors’ training by allowing them to follow their patients for more extended periods, especially in the critical hours after admission.<p>We really need the name of the human being who said that. That quote needs to be attributed to an individual who has to take some sort of responsibility for it.
Instead of 1 doctor working 75 hrs, how about 5 doctors working 15 hrs? And don't tell me there aren't enough candidates, the average acceptance rate for med schools is about 7%. Also its possible that there are people that would make great doctors but aren't in the top 10% of memorizing biology.
Wow, 24 hours is insane. I work 10 hour, overnight, shifts at an elderly care facility and sometimes I have to pull a double or 1.5 shift due to call-ins. I'm exhausted and I can barely drive home. My work doesn't compare to that of an M.D.
Does anyone know if doctors on shifts like this are given ample breaks to peruse polyphasic sleep? A 24-28 hour shift with 3-5 hours of polyphasic sleep doesn't seem quite as bad as just staying awake for 24 hours+
So now they will be "allowed" to work the hours that they already do. I have multiple resident physician friends and family members who routinely work 24+ hour shifts once a week, on top of 14-16 hour shifts daily yet if their time sheet says more than 80 hours/week, they are instructed to correct it.