Getting sleep versus staying engaged with the patient

Lisa Rosenbaum has posted a thoughtful piece over at The New Yorker entitled "Why Doesn't Medical Care Get Better When Doctors Rest More?"  After introducing a story about a patient, she says,A few days later, the resident caring for the patient neared the teaching hospital’s witching hour: whether or not his work was done, he had to leave at 6 P.M. That’s because, a decade ago, largely in response to widespread concerns that tired residents were making too many errors, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education enacted nationwide rules that limited the number of consecutive hours residents can work. Five years later, a review of the data suggested that, on average, the rules had failed to make our nation’s teaching hospitals any safer. Proponents of the reforms argued that the rules had neither gone far enough nor been properly enforced. Accordingly, in 2011, first-year residents were limited even more—to sixteen-hour shifts, rather than the thirty hours previously allowed. Training programs scrambled to comply. Rosenbaum then leads to some of the intangible aspects of the work hours rules:The data evaluating the impact of the 2003 reforms suggest that, when it comes to patient safety, little has changed in teaching hospitals. But when it comes to preparing young doctors to manage disease, the training environment has been completely transformed.While these studies suggest the complex nature of patient safety—that manipulating on...
Source: Running a hospital - Category: Health Managers Source Type: blogs