22 Apr
2011
22 Apr
'11
3:07 p.m.
For concentrated, high-pressure experience, the
overnight
call is still the
way that residents learn, particularly those low on the
totem pole such as
interns and sub-i's, because during the day there are
attendings and senior
residents and other services competing for what's on the
schedule. At night
it's you, maybe the senior, and you're first on the battle
lines. You learn
quickly and you get to do more because you're there.
and as I say I'm concerned about
shift work in
residency translating into doctors with poor followthru as
offendings, I
mean, attendings.
I also don't want to defend it all, and I would suspect
that there's a better way to do it, but there is one other
benefit I see to the forced endurance. If I have a surgeon
doing an 8, 10, or 12 hour procedure on me, I like the
idea that the length of time that person needs to be focused
and alert is much shorter than the lengths of time that
person was dealing with more typical cases during their
internship.
Also, I suspect that when it comes to the question of
accuracy and judgement during long shifts, there are
probably bigger factors than just time awake. I learned
early on that my coding ability isn't a monotonically
decreasing function of time since last sleep.
BLS