{"id":784,"date":"2006-11-03T10:08:26","date_gmt":"2006-11-03T10:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/03\/shorter-hours-for-doctors\/"},"modified":"2006-11-03T10:08:26","modified_gmt":"2006-11-03T10:08:26","slug":"shorter-hours-for-doctors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/03\/shorter-hours-for-doctors\/","title":{"rendered":"Shorter Hours for Doctors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Inside Higher Ed<\/cite>‘s Quick Takes<\/a>, some good news about the medical profession:<\/p>\n

\n

The proportion of medical residents who said they had worked more than 80 hours a week in the previous four weeks at any point during the 2005-6 academic year fell to 2.4 percent, spread among 18.7 percent of all residency programs, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education announced Thursday. That is down from 3.0 percent among 21 percent of programs in 2004-5 and 3.4 percent of residents among 24.8 percent of programs, the council said. The issue of excessive hours worked by doctors in training has been a major issue in recent years amid concerns about substandard patient care and ill health by the physicians themselves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> links a PDF report, if you want to read it.)<\/p>\n

The hazing rituals of the medical profession have been a source of bewilderment to me since I first became aware of what medical school actually involves. I’m absolutely baffled by the idea of having people who are going to provide critical medical care go without sleep for extended periods– I’ve read papers written by students who stayed up all night, and believe me, I don’t want any of them prescribing medication. And beyond that, I’ve always been amazed that some ambitious trial lawyer hasn’t sued every medical school in the country for a billion dollars based on this system.<\/p>\n

It’s good to hear that they’re moving toward saner hours for medical personnel, however slowly. Four consecutive eighty-hour weeks is a lot, and you can be seriously overworked without passing that threshold, but I’ll take what I can get.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Inside Higher Ed‘s Quick Takes, some good news about the medical profession: The proportion of medical residents who said they had worked more than 80 hours a week in the previous four weeks at any point during the 2005-6 academic year fell to 2.4 percent, spread among 18.7 percent of all residency programs, the… Continue reading Shorter Hours for Doctors<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-medicine","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}