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.