Aggravated DocSurg posts his thoughts about the effect of an 80 hour work week on general surgery residents:
>>Tuesday, December 27, 2005
80 hour week Redux
This month’s American Journal of Surgery contains an interesting article from the Dept. of Surgery at Baylor in Houston entitled Impact of the 80-hour work week on resident emergency operative experience. As I have written previously, I am not convinced the 80 hour work restrictions will deal an even hand to surgeons in training, or their future patients. <<
Although the intention of the 80 hour work week for residents is probably good, it certainly has its downfalls.
I was fortunate to finish my residency at Indiana University in 2003. This was the same year that the 80 hour work week was instituted.
As a urologic surgeon, I had a limited chance to learn how to operate and how to take care of patients.
I spent my first 2 years (6 total) of residency as a general surgery resident. Call was usually every 3rd night and there was a full work day to follow. I spent a fair amount of time in the operating room at night for emergencies and spent a lot of time taking care of patients. There was always someone above me to call if there were any significant problems. In fact, there were many instances where I would have to call the person above me or the doctor in charge of the patient.
The last 4 years at Indiana were spent exclusively as a urology resident. The time on call went to every 4th night for the first 2 years and then only at home call the last 2, as a backup to a lower level person.
This experience provided me as much time as possible to take care of patients, as well as to be involved with the maximum number of operations. There would have been times in todays environment where I would be at home instead of the operating room as a second assist.
As for patient safety, I think there are more patients being covered by less doctors at night in the current system.
In my current practice, I do not have urology residents (there are only 2 urology residencies in NJ and neither set of residents rotate through my hopsitals), so I cant speak from experience on the actual impact of the reduced work hour week, but I expect that there are more negatives than positives.