Are these really the people that should be required to work so much? Isn’t their job about handling life and death daily? Wouldn’t we want exactly these people to come fully rested to work every single day and be fully staffed?
I don’t know if there are jobs with similar stakes that are so carelessly staffed and disgustingly paid.
This is actually an interesting question.
They experimented with “office hours” for doctors and patients were dying more than double/triple shift.
This because the information lost during handoff was more valuable than doctors being more tired (and by consequence doing more mistakes).
This is a textbook example of the risks of lost context
I’d like to see those numbers. I’m not finding clear numbers on shift-length mortality. This meta review (Systematic Review of the Impact of Physician Work Schedules on Patient Safety with Meta-Analyses of Mortality Risk, 2023, DOI: 10.1016/j.jcjq.2023.06.014 ) says
I think we can all agree that a 28 hour shift is fucking insane and that anybody doing such a long shift will not be of sound capacity.
And if hand-offs are killing more people than work hours, then that just means that the hand-off procedures are terrible. I’d want to see what kind of hand-offs are being compared and if hand-off methods have different patient events.
I fully agree with this as far as why they do extended shifts of 12 hours or more. But, OP did say double and triple shifts so they might not be just referencing the longer shifts. In that case it is corporate greed.
I mean, did they increase staff numbers proportionally to hour reduction or did they just have people go home? Because if it’s the latter, then duh.
I’ve also heard that and it makes sense, but if it’s a statistic already at this point, can’t it serve as a way to improve information storing and handover? I have nothing in common with the medical industry, this is just an outside observation.