The AADPRT Position on Resident Duty Hours in the Learning and Working Environment.

Principles/Introduction A. Principles 1. The program must be committed to and be responsible for promoting patient safety and resident well‐being and to providing a supportive educational environment. 2. The learning objectives of the program must not be compromised by excessive reliance on residents to fulfill service obligations. 3. Didactic and clinical education must have priority in the allotment of residents' time and energy. 4. Duty hour assignments must recognize that faculty and residents collectively have responsibility for the safety and welfare of patients. Introduction Residency is an essential dimension of the transformation of the medical student to the independent practitioner along the continuum of medical education. It is physically, emotionally, and intellectually demanding, and requires longitudinally‐concentrated effort on the part of the resident. The specialty education of physicians to practice independently is experiential, and necessarily occurs within the context of the health care delivery system. Developing the skills, knowledge, and attitudes leading to proficiency in all the domains of clinical competency requires the resident physician to assume personal responsibility for the care of individual patients. For the resident, the essential learning activity is interaction with patients under the guidance and supervision of faculty members who give value, context, and meaning to those interactions. As residents gain experience and demonstrate growth in their ability to care for patients, they assume roles that permit them to exercise those skills with greater independence. This concept—graded and progressive responsibility—is one of the core tenets of American graduate medical education. Supervision in the setting of graduate medical education has the goals of assuring the provision of safe and effective care to the individual patient; assuring each resident's development of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes required to enter the unsupervised practice of medicine; and establishing a foundation for continued professional growth.