Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working over 80 hours in a 7 day period is just insane in and of itself, unless there is a major crisis you shouldn't be working more than 40hrs a week. People fought and died for an 8 hour workday, and here the AMA and hospitals are shitting all over it, putting everyone involved at risk. Should we bring back child labor while we're at it?
There are basically no children with enough experience to be doctors.
No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
181–190 of 208 posts
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#182I barely trust myself to do anything with 'sudo' on a production system after 24 hours without sleep, 30 hours without sleep and making life or death medical decisions is scary as shit.
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#183Thanks for posting this...I think up until this article was posted, everyone on earth assumed it was perfectly fine for Doctors to work 30 hours straight.
Thank god you posted this.
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#184A friend of mine is a PA who works in emergency medicine, which means he pulls 30 hour shifts sometimes. I challenged him about how, with what we now know about sleep deprivation, he could defend that schedule. He pointed out that much of medicine, especially emergency medicine, requires deep complex analysis of a wide variety of symptoms, some of which might seem unimportant or unrelated at first. We've all seen sho…
Sounds like there's a need for pair-doctoring.
- Always have 2 doctors for everything
- Stagger/overlap the shifts
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
A doctor friend of mine claims that the benefits of doctor-patient continuity outweigh any downsides of sleep deprivation. That sounded like a rationalization or cop-out to me, though. I can't imagine how that could be true, or that they're aren't other ways to solve the continuity problem that don't involve zombie doctors.
I would agree. In extended hospital sessions that my wife and I have experienced, having continuity was huge, especially as the nurses swap out every 8-12 hours. In my case, I suffered from this issue after a back surgery when some dumbass hospitalist read my chart wrong and told the nurse to cut off pain medication 10 hours after a spinal fusion. I asked the nurse for meds after she woke me up at 3 AM (to take my bl…
> some dumbass hospitalist read my chart wrong
But couldn't this also be explained by said person lacking enough sleep?
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#186Should any parent be "allowed" to care for a newborn baby for 30 hours straight witg no sleep? Perhaps we should ensure that parents do not care for their children for more than 8 hours in a row, to ensure an appropriate quality of care.... :)
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#187A friend of mine is a PA who works in emergency medicine, which means he pulls 30 hour shifts sometimes. I challenged him about how, with what we now know about sleep deprivation, he could defend that schedule. He pointed out that much of medicine, especially emergency medicine, requires deep complex analysis of a wide variety of symptoms, some of which might seem unimportant or unrelated at first. We've all seen sho…
If handoffs were really the reason, a few seconds thought suggests ways to deal with that. For example, assign fewer patients per doctor, and let the doctor grab short bursts of sleep in between seeing patients. Yet somehow, I feel confident in predicting that if you start suggesting those solutions to the authorities, you'll find they are utterly uninterested.
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#188A friend of mine is a PA who works in emergency medicine, which means he pulls 30 hour shifts sometimes. I challenged him about how, with what we now know about sleep deprivation, he could defend that schedule. He pointed out that much of medicine, especially emergency medicine, requires deep complex analysis of a wide variety of symptoms, some of which might seem unimportant or unrelated at first. We've all seen sho…
Sounds like there's a need for pair-doctoring. - Always have 2 doctors for everything - Stagger/overlap the shifts
- double the cost of already expensive medical care
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#189A friend of mine is a PA who works in emergency medicine, which means he pulls 30 hour shifts sometimes. I challenged him about how, with what we now know about sleep deprivation, he could defend that schedule. He pointed out that much of medicine, especially emergency medicine, requires deep complex analysis of a wide variety of symptoms, some of which might seem unimportant or unrelated at first. We've all seen sho…
overlap the shifts by 2 hours. Why is that not an acceptable solution, outside of economics?
Who wants to start the AM 2 hours earlier or finish the night 2 hours later?
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#190A friend of mine is a PA who works in emergency medicine, which means he pulls 30 hour shifts sometimes. I challenged him about how, with what we now know about sleep deprivation, he could defend that schedule. He pointed out that much of medicine, especially emergency medicine, requires deep complex analysis of a wide variety of symptoms, some of which might seem unimportant or unrelated at first. We've all seen sho…
1. That's weird, what the heck ED do they do 30 hour shifts in? Non-US? My wife is an ED physician in the US and that does not ever happen in any ED she's been in. 2. She's also boarded in internal medicine, where she did have to do 30 hour shifts. They are terrible for patients and physicians, and I've been in heated arguments with physicians because I think the primary reason they exist is as hazing. 3. Handoffs ar…
What, with your knowledge, could be done with technology to solve this problem of handoff?
A notepad app probably wouldn't cut it, but is there any way to move the complex thoughts in a doctors mind into a database somehow?