Resident Work Hours: The Five Stages of Grief

Selected Articles on Resident and Physician Work Hours

AOA should support IOM report on resident work hours.

To the Editor: In December 2008, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report, Resident Duty Hours: Enhancing Sleep, Supervision, and Safety,1 calling for changes in resident training programs to reduce fatigue-related medical errors and to protect patients. Shortly after the IOM released its report, the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) weighed in on the report’s findings—with a pres...

Will reduced resident work hours improve the state of the art of healing?

At the outset, it might be best to say that the answer to the question of how reduced resident work hours will affect the art of healing is unsettled in the minds of most. The publication of the Institute of Medicine report, " To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, " in 2000 resulted in a national initiative to improve quality and safety in medicine [1]. More than a decade earlier, in...

Restricting resident work hours: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

OBJECTIVES Inadequate sleep and long work hours are long-standing traditions in the medical profession, and work schedules are especially intense in resident physicians. However, it has been increasingly recognized that the extreme hours commonly worked by residents may have substantial occupational and patient safety consequences. Largely because of these concerns, new regulations related to r...

Implementing the 2009 Institute of Medicine recommendations on resident physician work hours, supervision, and safety

Long working hours and sleep deprivation have been a facet of physician training in the US since the advent of the modern residency system. However, the scientific evidence linking fatigue with deficits in human performance, accidents and errors in industries from aeronautics to medicine, nuclear power, and transportation has mounted over the last 40 years. This evidence has also spawned regula...