md-admissions:

Two years after the 16-hour mandate was established for doctors in training, studies on the outcomes are being published, and the results reveal one thing: Maybe we should have thought a little harder about the arithmetic.

No one is joking when they say that being a 21st century doctor is hard. The new rules on hour restrictions and the poor way it has been addressed with ‘floater’ schedules and the like has been discouraging. I haven’t started my clerkship yet, but this is definitely something on my mind. 

With Doc Star being a surgical intern, this really hit home. I can’t tell you how many times he’s told me that there is just not enough time to get everything done and not enough people to do it, especially at night.

Others adopted a “night float” system that meant a resident just a year out of internship had to carry the work of as many as 12 interns at night, looking after more than 100 patients and fielding questions about those patients at best every 20 minutes and at worst every 11 minutes throughout the night.

His very first night as an intern, he worked a Friday night and was expected to cover 40+ patients and know everything about them. He carried 4 pagers and constantly being paged. Last month he had a whole month of night float. He alone had to personally carry all the pagers for the vascular, cardiovascular, and neuro patients, which of course were the sickest patients. His pagers were constantly going off and the nights were just crazy. And after running around all evening and morning, he is expected to present every single patient on A.M. rounds.

Another point is DS wants to take advantage of his vacation days, but he can’t help but feel guilty when he leaves more work for the other residents when he is gone. He’s been left with 3x the work when others are out, so he understands. He needs days off, but knows that he’s leaving someone else with more work than they can handle.

Bottom line is they are understaffed. I agree: “Until we address the problem of overwork, we’re just playing a shell game.”

This is where I got the recipe for the energy bites I made for Doc Star. I added some Cherry Craisins and a little but if Nutella (shh).