What should we do with work hours?

The Atlantic has this article – No Doctor Should Work 30 Straight Hours Without Sleep After retweeting this article with this text: Very interesting article that provides much outrage but no data. Many trainees prefer the longer shifts. Here is a tweet response – I hated 16’s. Much prefer 24’s. But l wouldn’t continue a surgical residency w/o the weekly hr cap. I work in a program where interns work 14-16 at most, but residents on some services do 24s.  On some services, they have built a schedule so that most residents get sleep most of the nights.  On others they get no sleep. My current resident made these observations. New second year residents feel less prepared for ICU rotations and supervision – the program had to change some rotations As long as the 80 hour per week rule continues, most residents prefer the longer rotation You can develop a 24 hour rotation that includes a high probability of sleep – and interns and residents will learn more What will programs do?  How will this impact intern applicants when they develop their match list? I suspect we will see great variety in how programs handle this potential change. As an intern I worked every 3rd with approximately 34 hour shifts.  We had no days off.  But we generally could get a few hours sleep.  Getting some sleep does make a huge difference. I believe education would benefit from the longer shift, given a structure that has the on call intern and resident adm...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Medical Rants Source Type: blogs