No Doctor Should Work 30 Hours Straight with No Sleep
A friend of mine is a PA who works in emergency medicine, which means he pulls 30 hour shifts sometimes.I challenged him about how, with what we now know about sleep deprivation, he could defend that schedule.He pointed out that much of medicine, especially emergency medicine, requires deep complex analysis of a wide variety of symptoms, some of which might seem unimportant or unrelated at first. We've all seen shows like House where it takes a genius to diagnose the root cause of a set of weird symptoms. While that is obviously exaggerated, the reality is that diagnosis is often difficult and in an ER, happens continuously with treatment.He said there is no way that a doctor or PA can fully hand that mental flow state off to another one. So the scariest thing to him is handoff--what if he forgets to document or mention some seemingly minor detail that ends up being crucial??Long shifts give medical personnel more continuous time with each patient, reducing the chance that handoff will come too early in treatment, when mistakes or misses have a greater impact. It also permits long periods of overlap between shifts."Being sleep deprived is bad for care," he admitted, "but so are handoffs." He feels that as long as the total time per week does not exceed too many hours, long shifts are good for care.