Medical people have horrible schedules. They put in long days, sometimes overnight, without breaks or even much time to sleep. Even if you do get a day off, you might be the on-call person so that if you’re needed, you get called in and put to work. Any time, night or day, doctors can be summoned and that leads to sleeping problems. Sleep deprivation among doctors is a problem, according to some researchers, and it’s a problem that might cost patients their lives.
“The ideal solution here is that patients and surgeons never are put in the situation where an operation needs to happen when a surgeon is fatigued,” wrote Dr. Nurok of New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery in an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Patient requests for physician schedules “may be necessary until institutions take the responsibility for ensuring that patients rarely face such dilemmas.”
That’s basically fancy doctor talk for letting doctors get a good night’s sleep before they’re arm-deep in entrails while performing an elective surgery like plastic surgery or necessary surgery that can be postponed like laser eye surgery. The last thing I’d want is for a doctor to doze off while slicing up my innards, and I’d imagine most people would feel the same way.
Tags: Michael Nurok, New York, Hospital for Special Surgery, New England Journal of Medicine, sleep deprivation in surgeons, medical risks from sleepy doctors, sleeping and surgery, doctors need to sleep before surgery, surgery and doctor sleepiness