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January 13, 2005

Sleepy Doc...

CNN.com - Study: Sleepy docs a liability for hospitals - Jan 13, 2005

I actually got to read this story - Matthew gets the New England Journal of Medicine and I glanced through the issue before he got home.

It's kind of scary - they basically show that the chances of a hospital intern who has just gotten off an extended shift having an automobile accident is roughly comparable to the odds of a legally drunk driver having a similar accident. This is a two-fold increase from interns who have just completed a normal shift.

Apparently (I'm not in medical school, so this should be confirmed) the whole business of having extended shifts is a holdover from the days when doctors lived as residents at a hospital (ahh, so that's where the term 'residency' comes from!) so that they could observe patients on a consistant basis. But 60 years ago, I could imagine that the thought of staying awake for 30+ hours would have been preposterous to those doctors. Why do we put our doctors through this obviously detrimental process? Is it simply a cost-cutting measure? I've heard other things, too, like the fact that doctors (who have themselves endured such brutality) feel that they made it through, and therefore the young upstarts ought to as well. Unfortunately, it's those same old-boy doctors who make the policies.

I'm glad I'm not a medical student. What foolishness. And you can guarantee that if I, for some bizarre reason, was actually a med student, I would not put up with this kind of stuff. Losing sleep is not foreign to me (see last night for example) but it's always done in a reasonable manner -- and I don't have the lives of vulnerable patients in my hands.

Posted by kgutwin at January 13, 2005 09:51 PM

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