Working Time Directive in an All Female Specialty

Working time directive in an all female specialty.

Oman is not the only country where obstetrics and gynecology is a specialty dominated by female doctors, the trend is the same even in the west. Gerber and Sassao reported that as the proportion of men entering obstetrics and gynecology residency programs declined, the number of women entering general obstetrics and gynecology (OBGYN) was declining at an even more “dramatic rate”.1 Men graduati...

Maximizing time from the constraining European Working Time Directive (EWTD): The Heidelberg New Working Time Model

BACKGROUND The introduction of the European Working Time Directive (EWTD) has greatly reduced training hours of surgical residents, which translates into 30% less surgical and clinical experience. Such a dramatic drop in attendance has serious implications such compromised quality of medical care. As the surgical department of the University of Heidelberg, our goal was to establish a model that...

European Working Time Directive in a stroke unit: hidden deficits.

Sir, The study by Cappucio et al. 1 argues that the 48-h working limit per week can improve patient safety when the range of the working week period is reduced. Their data have been criticized, in part because of the casemix variation between the traditional and intervention arms of the study and unblinding of the initial nurse assessors of medical errors. 2,3 As the authors explain, retrospect...

The European working time directive for doctors in training.

Critical care--an all-encompassing specialty.

The August 29 issue of the Journal will include the first in a series of review articles on critical care. Critical care is a young specialty that is generally considered to have developed from the successful use of invasive ventilation during the 1952 polio epidemic in Copenhagen. In his report of the response to that epidemic, Ibsen described much more than the use of invasive ventilation; he...