Do resident work-hour caps save lives?

July 13, 2007

There is a mild improvement in medical patients, but none for surgical patients:

“Before the regulations, 60 out of every 1,000 medical patients died. After the regulations, the number of deaths was 57 or 58 out of every 1,000,” said the study’s lead author, Kanaka Shetty . . .

. . . Another 200,000 surgical patients were also examined, but the new rules did not seem to have an impact on their death rate.

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{ 1 comment }

1 Anonymous July 13, 2007 at 8:05 pm

I can tell you that the surgical residents at my current institution routinely break the 80 hour rule. Just had this conversation yesterday with one of them. This workload is expected.
I doubt mine is the only institution where this is commonplace and because of this I question how we can accurately critique the results when it is common knowledge that few actually obey the guidelines?

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