The Swedish duty hour enigma

The Swedish duty hour enigma

BACKGROUND The Swedish resident duty hour limit is regulated by Swedish and European legal frameworks. With a maximum average of 40 working hours per week, the Swedish duty hour regulation is one of the most restrictive in the world. At the same time, the effects of resident duty hour limits have been neither debated nor researched in the Swedish context. As a result, little is known about the ...

Implications of the 2011 ACGME duty hour rules.

simultaneously reduced clinical, research, and educational funds for our academic units and for the organizations that host them. The urge may be to hunker down and conservatively manage our scarce resources and our portfolio of programs—and take fewer risks. Paradoxically, this is clearly a time when we need to expand the primary care workforce, and when there appear to be bountiful opportunit...

16-hour call duty schedules: the Quebec experience

Since 1 July 2012, as a result of a labour arbitration ruling in the province of Quebec and the subsequent agreement negotiated by the Fédération des médecins résidents du Québec, all 3,400 medical residents training in Quebec have been on a 16-hour duty schedule for in-house calls. This is a major change within medical teaching sites, as well as a professional and educational challenge for phy...

Scheduling in the context of resident duty hour reform

Fuelled by concerns about resident health and patient safety, there is a general trend in many jurisdictions toward limiting the maximum duration of consecutive work to between 14 and 16 hours. The goal of this article is to assist institutions and residency programs to make a smooth transition from the previous 24- to 36-hour call system to this new model. We will first give an overview of the...

Resident duty-hour reform: moving beyond "change for change's sake".