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No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
41–50 of 208 posts
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have people that have gone through the ringer to become doctors. These are the type of people that when you say jump, they ask how high. You can pretty much get them to do anything you want... because they are self-selected to be that sort of people otherwise they could have never become doctors. So when a manager comes to them and tells them they have to work so and so hours, they do it. And they suck it up, bec…
This is not true. A doctor is a person who is extremely motivated by money but was too uncreative to come up with their own path for getting there. They suck it up because its going to allow them to buy their 3rd summer beach house. Not because they are genuinely better people.
Damn I feel sorry for you. Although I'm an engineer, I know many many doctors around me (admittedly not many in the US). Most of them (especially the new generation in their mid 30s) are curious, innovative, hard working and do the extra mile for their patients. They work long hours because: they love what they do and don't see themselves doing any other thing and because they care about the outcome of their patients.
I agree that not all doctors are like that, but saying that all doctors are what you are describing is false and insulting.
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#43I remember hearing about sleep deprivation in the medical field before; especially for people who work in the ER or as surgeons. The demand in the US for nurses and doctors is very high, and so are the education costs which can be prohibitive to people getting into medicine. There's a whole system of failures, from the cost of education to the student loan systems to medical insurance and billing, that has led direct…
The issue is that of management. The management profession has taken over hospitals and it runs those according to management practices. Overworked doctors are a result of (bad) management, and nothing else.
I suggest you talk to some older doctors. If you did you'd discover that these insane schedules of work and training have been standard since before either of your parents were born.
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
But nurses are no different. We need to start addressing the leading cause of medical accidents - physicians/nurses sleep deprivation.
I know of no nurses that work this schedule, even voluntarily (overtime, swaps). Nursing in many states is challenged by unsafely high patient:staff ratios, excessive documentation requirements (on extremely slow user interfaces), and the need to vigorously double-check physician's orders (dangerous drug interactions, over-dosages, etc).
I do. Nurse midwives, and other mid-level providers are often subject to similar hours and work schedules.
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#45The medical system will disagree: all doctors should work 30 hours straight with no sleep, else they're not real doctors and slacking off.
Sounds a little like startup culture. If you don't work 80 hours per week you are not a real startup.
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#46This is only one side of the tradeoff. Both tiredness and shift hand-offs cause bad judgement, and both can kill people. An analysis that only looks at one is incomplete.
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#47Doesn't this level of overwork originate with one medical instructor, who was a habitual cocaine user and thought nothing of going without sleep?
I remember reading this somewhere, but can't remember where.
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#48Didn't they do a study and find that decreasing doctor hours caused an increase in patient mortality because of handoff errors? And that digitizing records didn't help because of a combination of inaccurate measurement by the staff and because of factors that can't be measured (intuitive observation, etc).
There are certainly handoff errors, but the vast majority of these can be avoided with a well structured handoff with safety-checks built in. The problems that make handoff bad include:
1) Handoff being done at the end of a long shift, so the doctors handing off their patients are tired, sick of working, and desperate to go home
2) Handoffs being interrupted by sick patients (understandably so) - I was once in a handoff that was abandoned half way through because of a cardiac arrest that half the team had to run off to
3) Rubbish handover systems - most hospitals use hand written notes on scraps of paper carried round by doctors; these can be lost, misread, or accidentally forgotten. There are some technological solutions being developed, but few hospitals have employed them so far
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#49The culture of medicine, at least at the physician level, is completely insane; it's so insane that describing its insanity is part of the reason I wrote "Why you should become a nurse or physicians assistant instead of a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school" ( https://jakeseliger.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-become-a-n... ). Residents in particular have no power, and even physicians themselves frequently…
But nurses are no different. We need to start addressing the leading cause of medical accidents - physicians/nurses sleep deprivation.
No, we should direct all the hate at lawyers asking for more than 250k for malpractice
Re: No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was forced to do 100 hours a week for a company that had a sadistic culture of over work, you never get anything done, under those kind of hours unless you're doing stimulant drugs your brain just shuts down. I wonder how many doctors are also drug addicts just to make this kind of work intensity physically possible even?
I'm surrounded by doctors and I don't know any that abuse drugs, other than alcohol and maybe weed. I believe they are just so busy and so overworked that they are constantly moving around / doing paperwork. The demands of the job keep them going.
You don't know any doctors that use drugs, but you do know of some that do weed.
I'm laughing...
Is weed a kind of tea, or is that an energy bar?