This post has been shared by the AdvoConnection Blog. It was written with a patient-client audience in mind, but might be useful to you, too.
It is provided so you can find it in a search here at myAPHA.org, but you’ll need to link to the original post to read it in its entirety. Find the link to that post at the end of the excerpt.
Does Your Doctor Seem Tired?
So we changed our clocks last night; lost an hour of sleep or an hour of our day. It’s Sunday, so at least most of us don’t have to go to work today, giving us a day to adjust. All day long we’ll look at the clock and think it seems weird. For many of us, the toughest part will be when the alarm goes off tomorrow morning, when we have to get up for work and feel like we…just…didn’t…get…enough…sleep… For those of us who work or manage families (or both)… we never seem to catch up on sleep anyway. Most of us get some sleep every night, even if it never seems enough. So imagine if you were a young doctor, just out of medical school, in the midst of your hospital residency, and you faced a 16 hour workday. From your own point of view, it’s exhausting just to think about it! Now what if you learned that the accreditation body for graduate medical students (the ACGME) has just raised the number of hours a student doctor might work from those 16 – to 28? Yes – student doctors will now be working 28 hour shifts in the hospital before they can go home to sleep. Then, eight hours later, they’ll be expected back in the hospital to work another 28 hours; up to 80 hours in a week. That makes me angry! Because while those young doctors will pay the price by feeling exhausted all the time, the real penalty will be paid by the patients who won’t get the sharper minds and honed skills of a rested doctor. I wonder how many patients will get sicker, or die because of it? In 2010, the Institute of Medicine issued a report citing the safety concerns of long hours for student doctors, and recommended their hours be reduced. In response, the ACGME, did reduce the hours – to 16. But too many old-school doctors wanted their students to suffer as they had – called by one report “the hazing ritual of exhaustion.” Add that to the fact that hospitals love student doctors because their paychecks are only a fraction of those more experienced doctors, and because they aren’t responsible for the students’ malpractice insurance (which is paid by the medical university) – and you’ll understand why we will begin to see more exhaustion on the faces of those…