Especially since, at least from what I hear from friends, nurses aren't that expensive, and you don't need to hire a new doctor with every new nurse to make quite the difference in patient's experiences.
The whole system amazes me all the time. We have the people who need to think very clearly and be very awake do 18, 24 and more shifts. That doesn't sound like they'd be at peak performance at all times.
> Health care workers need to begin to think of coming to work impaired by chronic sleep deprivation as similar to coming to work impaired by alcohol. Studies reveal that as ethanol and sleep loss increase, psychomotor performance decreases and memory is impaired. A 2-hour sleep loss is equivalent to a 0.045% breath-alcohol concentration, and a 4-hour sleep loss is equivalent to a 0.095% breath-alcohol concentration — above Texas' legal limit of 0.08%.
> In the traditional-schedule group, interns were on call every third night, working 24 hours or more. In the intervention group, interns worked no extended shifts (>17 hours) and averaged 65 work hours each week. Besides having about 6 hours less sleep each week and twice the number of attentional failures (EEG evidence of severe drowsiness), the traditional-schedule group made 36% more serious medical errors than the intervention group.
When we ask nurses which shift pattern (8 hours, 12 hours, or 14 hours) is safest they tend to say 8 hours. But when we ask them which provides best work-life balance they tend to say 14 hours. This is apparently a really difficult problem for the workforce to tackle.
The whole system amazes me all the time. We have the people who need to think very clearly and be very awake do 18, 24 and more shifts. That doesn't sound like they'd be at peak performance at all times.