Residency work-hours reform

The Gordon Wilson Lecture: work hours, sleep and patient safety in residency training.

In February, 2005, I was asked by the Department of Anesthesia at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to attend their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report rounds to discuss a fallasleep motor vehicle crash that had occurred on February 20, 2005 in one of their trainees. The trainee was a 39-year-old white male who was in his fifth postgraduate year of training as an anesthesia fellow (C...

Hours of Work

Internal Medicine Residency Reform : Task Force Report

T he structure, process, and outcomes of internal medicine residency training have concerned the profession for over 20 years. Over the last decade the initiative to move to outcomes-based education redefined the competencies physicians should obtain during training. The core principle of outcomes-based education is the objective demonstration that a graduating trainee, whether from medical sch...

Employment and Hours of Work

This paper develops a dynamic model of the labor market in which the degree of substitution between employment and hours of work is determined as part of a search equilibrium. Each firm chooses the demand for working hours and the number of vacancies, and the hourly wage rate is determined by Nash bargaining. A firm increases the demand for hours as recruitment becomes more costly. Labor market...

Reduced work hours: who benefits?

Many countries in the Western hemisphere now impose limitations on hours of work on medical staff. In the United States, a change resulted from the investigations that followed the death of Libby Zion in 1984, an 18-year-old daughter of an attorney and journalist in a New York hospital.3 Although an investigating committee found no doctor directly liable, they thought that resident’s deprivatio...