Scientific Research

Los Angeles Times: Limiting hospital intern shifts may not cut errors, studies find

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Shortening shifts for first-year interns often doesn’t cut workloads and can cause more problematic patient ‘handoffs,’ researchers say.

March 25, 2013

It’s been 15 years now, but Dr. Sanjay Desai remembers the brutal hours he worked as a young medical intern and how he struggled with fatigue while treating patients.

“There were days we were easily working 36 hours straight and you couldn’t remember how you got home — if you got home,” Desai said. “It wasn’t safe.”

Times have changed. Regulations now demand that teaching hospitals limit first-year trainees to 16-hour shifts. By reducing work hours, medical authorities reasoned, interns would get more sleep, suffer less fatigue and commit fewer mistakes.

But a pair of studies published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine suggest this may not be the case. Researchers concluded that interns were making more mistakes and learning less after the shift restrictions.

Read the full article at Los Angeles Times »

A paradox for young docs: New work-hour restrictions may increase, not decrease, errors

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U-M-led study of 2,300 1st-year residents questions impact of 2011 duty rules

March 25, 2013

At hospitals around the country, young doctors fresh out of medical school help care for patients of all kinds – and work intense, long hours as part of their residency training.

Traditionally, residents were allowed to work more than 24 hours without a break. In 2011, new rules cut back the number of hours they can work consecutively to 16, in the name of protecting patients from errors by sleepy physicians.

But a new study of more than 2,300 doctors in their first year of residency at over a dozen hospital systems across the country raises questions about how well the rules are protecting both patients and new doctors.

While work hours went down after new rules took effect in 2011, sleep hours didn’t go up significantly and risk of depression symptoms in the doctors stayed the same, according to a new paper published online in JAMA Internal Medicine by a team led by University of Michigan Medical School researchers.

Read the full article at EurekaAlert »

Neuroscience Advances Showcased in Washington

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Dr. Huda Akil’s presentation mentioned in NIMH Director’s Blog

November 18, 2011 – Thomas Insel – National Institute of Mental Health

Anyone who wonders about the vitality of our field should have attended the Society for Neuroscience meeting here in Washington, DC, this week. Over 32,000 neuroscientists, many of them under 30, descended on Washington for five days of lectures, symposia, and posters about the nervous system. Having attended this meeting almost every year since 1982, this year I was struck by the increasing interest in neuropsychiatric disorders, especially autism and schizophrenia.

Read the full article at NIMH »