AOL Top News- Doctors' Long Shifts Are Risky for Patients - AOL News
http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/doctors-long-shifts-are-risky-for/20061212114009990001
(Dec. 12) -- Medical residents are routinely scheduled to work shifts that last 24 hours or more, yet a study out today suggests that these sleep-deprived doctors are at high risk of making medical mistakes that can harm or even kill patients.
"Working for more than 24 hours is hazardous," says sleep researcher Charles Czeisler at the Harvard Medical School. Scores of studies show that people who stay awake for 18 hours straight can have trouble thinking clearly and can zone out or nod off suddenly.
MY THOUGHTS:
These long hours for residents have been around for many, many years. What the current crop of teachers & hospital administrators have forgotten is what it used to be like!
Fifty years back, without today's advanced technology and medicines, the attending resident would go to sleep in the evening while working a 24-hour shift. If a patient's condition changed, the nurse on duty might or might not waken the resident because there might have been nothing the resident could do and the nurse would know this.
Also, the highly advanced emergency rooms of today did not exist and neither did the Emergency Medical System (EMS) with its paramedics & EMTs ... most ambulances were operated by funeral homes and the drivers might not even not basic first aid.
If you can find a physician from that era, he will be able to tell you those 24-hour shifts did not keep him awake the whole time as it does today.
Just because someone maintains "it has always been done that way" does not necessarily mean "exactly that way" because they are remembering only part of the details.
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