Limiting resident work-hour restrictions will increase the burden on mid-level providers, like PAs and NPs.
There are currently no restrictions for mid-levels, but do they regularly exceed 80 working hours per week?
In a letter to the editor, it’s possible that some apparently do, as “it is common practice for physician assistants to work back-to-back shifts at different hospitals, thus making it difficult to track their hours.”
This is the start of a slippery slope for reducing the work for all medical personnel.
There are currently no work restrictions after a doctor in training graduates. How will residents, used to mandated naps and weekly caps on work, handle that?
Additionally, the current trend of limiting hours for everyone is going to run into serious cost difficulties, as our health system isn’t ready to commit to hiring the additional staff required to pick up the slack.
Related posts:
- How work-hour restrictions harms resident surgeon training
- Work-hour restrictions in surgery?
- Work-hour restrictions = scut management
- Who will pick up the slack from resident work-hour restrictions?
- Restricting resident work hours forces doctors to lie, and other unintended consequences of the 80-hour work week
- Resident work hour restrictions
- Resident work hour restrictions: Good for nothing?
{ 2 comments }
What about attendings? Attendings may have priviliges at more than one hospital. What is to stop someone from working in clinic all day, taking call (and possibly operating) at night then then going to work the next day? Oh, lots of us do that already…
Is some organization going to limit the work hours of faculty MDs and non-academic MDs (and DOs?) How would this be enforced? And where are the extra docs going to come from?
You see all those trucks parked on the interstate with the lights on. They’re not stopping for the view. Airline pilots don’t have all those days off in a month because they’re just lucky. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if someone tried to regulate attending work hours too. (They already do in anesthesia, BTW.) Good. People will realize when they can’t even get the appointments they think are already too long to wait for that medicine was never a nine-to-five kind of occupation. Better yet, let someone show that rested attendings are safer attendings. It will be a real study of the law of unintended consequences.
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