What better way to spend the holidays than to work a 24-hour shift. 5am, still up seeing patients, occasionally surfing the web...I should be asleep. home in 2 hours. Scheduled to work on Christmas day too. Ah...the life of an intern. Anyone else awake?

 

I'm awake. been at work for only 9hrs of a 10hr shift. but atleast I'm making 2.5x my normal pay rate... and I get to sit down.

you med students are must be sick to get into a field like that. (yes, pun intended)

 

I'll be up all week, probably quite a few 24 hour shifts!
My car will help remind me why I work so damn hardl.....

 

You're only an intern. It's not too late.
See the light and go into an easy field: Radiology.

 

Only 24hrs? I think its time you put your Big Boy pants on and stop complaining In other words, get used to it. Its not the last holiday you will ever work. I usually work Thanksgiving, X-mas or NYE etc. When I was an intern, it wasn't uncommon to do 32-36hrs depending on the amount of cases you had scheduled post-call.
Are you an ER intern?

 

I have to ask... Xblade, medstudent...

do you not feel that working such long, grueling hours diminishes your mental/physical abilities and thus would make you more prone to making errors?

it has always seemed to me unbelievable that there wouldn't be some sort of mandated 8 good hours of rest between shifts of say... max 12 hrs. or something to that effect.

if it's the medical field version of "boot camp" I honestly think it unnecessarily potentially risks the lives of patients, and truly destroys the minds and bodies of those in the medical field... I mean, look what it did to tenblade!




j/k bud.

 

You're touching on a very controversial subject, regarding work hrs, mental fatigue and its effect on medical staff. Here is my 2cents. I've worked 30+hrs and been sooo tired that I could fall asleep standing up. BUT, when it comes time to see a patient in the ER or operate, the adrenaline kicks in and I've been fine. There is not one single study that can attribute ANY medical error to sleep deprivation. With that said, I will grant that I am slower on rounds and it takes me longer to process some "unimportant" information i.e. I have to look up a drug dose, when I usually know it off of the top my head, but nothing that puts a patient in danger.
So, here's the controversy. A couple of years ago, some candy-ass medical students (keep in mind, they had not even begun residency) and a FAMILY PRACTICE resident (bolded b/c these schmucks have a cake walk for residency) began to make noise about work hours and its effect on residents...again, these a**holes are not even physicians yet and already they're whining. They went to congress to try and get a bill passed regulating work hrs for residents. It failed to passed, but it scared the ACGME (the governing body for residency programs) to implement an maximum 80-88hr work week schedule. This has been nothing but trouble for most residents. In short, we are expected to get the same amount of work done, but with less time and less manpower to get it done. Second, it facilitates a "clock-watcher" mentality, that IMO, is simply unacceptable for someone in the medical profession. If someone wants a 9-5 job, get the phuck out of medicine and go into something else....don't ruin it for the rest of us. As attending physicians, we will be forced to operate on little sleep or see patients in office hrs post-call. Under the old system, you could do this b/c you were used to it. It's like training for a marathon: you can't go out and expect to run 25miles right off the bat, but after training, you will be able to. Well, its the same thing here. The 1st several months of internship used to be hell, but once you got used to it, it was no big deal....hell, I could do 24hrs standing on my head. Unfortunately, the new breed of MD's don't have the dedication that my class had. They want all the benefits of being a physician without the sacrifices. IMO, this, more than anything, puts patients at risk. More and more of the younger MDs are willing to sign out a sick patient rather than take care of them themselves i.e. there's no ownership of patients. I am more often than not, disappointed with the level of commitment I see in my medical students and Jr. residents....they wouldn't last a day under the old system. In short, their laziness and lack of ownership puts patients at risk...not being tired.

 

Steve, I'd bet this is the case (laziness, lack of "ownership", etc.) in many professions today when looking at the younger people coming into that particular career.

 

I appreciate your taking the time to answer, and apologies if I touched on a sore spot. I did have some obvious questions (that I typed, then deleted), but with some introspection on my part, they're so obvious that I'm sure they've been touched on 1000x before, by people more educated and experienced than I, so no need to rehash them. (Besides, I could always just google the answers, as I'm sure this has been researched extensively.)

And I guess the answer really was fairly obvious all along. If those in the medical field really thought that working such long hours was a danger to themselves or their patients, they wouldn't do it. You're willing to do it despite the fact that is *does* make for a long, hard work week, and your dedication to the profession and patients is clearly unwavering.

'nuf said.

(If I'm ever in your neck of the woods, first round of coffee is on me. )

 

Tenblade speaks like a true surgeon.

I think the reform was also due in part to an error made by a psych resident in a famous case in NY (I forgot the name) where MAOI was given to a patient with cocaine on board. The patient died. Patient's father is a very influential newspaper editor (or something like that) who made went on a crusade to make sure his daughter's death had a meaning.
it was determined (for better or for worse; true or false) that long hours affected this resident's clear thinking.
When I was doing residency and medschool. this time-limit rule was in effect but the hospitals and attendings found ways around it.