It's a trade-off. I won't defend abusive working conditions or forced sleep deprivation. But research has shown that the risk of serious medical errors greatly increases when a hospitalized patient is handed off from one doctor to another. This is a real phenomenon which has been extensively studied. So, when doctors work long hours it does improve patient outcomes, up to a point.
how is this relevant though? One could conceive of a schedule where doctors and nurses work 12 hours shifts 3 days a week, and give them every other day off. Then nobody is sleep deprived and handoffs are reduced. Just hire double the doctors and nurses, this way there are no gaps in the work week!
Logically this is a very obvious and simple solution. But there are a few problems.
1. doctors and nurses expect to be paid a lot of money. Especially doctors, because they go into a lot of debt to get their education.
2. there IS money in the system to hire double the amount of doctors and nurses, but there’s an artificial shortage of doctors
3. there are many administrators with their hand in the cookie jar. More money should go to the people working directly with patients.
The status quo isn’t a good trade off. It’s probably the best outcome in our currently broken system though.
most serious errors crop up during shift changes. nurses forget to check a box, or get distracted and leave something out, doctors don't do a follow up, etc.
over millions of hospital hours across the US -- the 3rd most populous country in the world -- each shift change causes dozens of errors, and people sometimes die from that.
increasing them to 12 or 24 hour shifts does increase the likelihood of fatigue-based poor decisions and errors, but at a lesser amount than shift change-related errors.
As far as I understand, the most common achievable choice is between staffing a hospital with 3 8 hour shifts per day or 2 1w hour shifts per day. Studies have shown the 12 hour shift system has better outcomes.
