Doctors are human. They feel stress, boredom, surprise and tiredness. A doctor specializing in sleep and sleep deprivation understands these demands and conditions well. These experts realize the public wants all medical professionals to be perfect. Part of this expectation infers that doctors should ignore tiredness.
Unfortunately, Pennsylvania physicians, as human beings, risk making medical errors if they disregard the need for sleep. Some laypersons treat needing sleep as a physician physical and character weakness. Much like football players refuse to admit when they're hurt, doctors seldom admit to being tired, for fear of appearing to be less committed to healing.
Most doctors are neither less-than-committed nor immune to sleep deprivation effects, which can be dangerous. Doctors are not impervious to fatigue and suffer when deprived of sleep just as the rest of us do. Although highly educated, many doctors lack sufficient knowledge to recognize sleep deprivation and sleep disorder symptoms. This lack of knowledge prevents many medical professionals from identifying these symptoms in their patients, also.
The effects of sleep deprivation in doctors can be serious issues . Among the common consequences are surgical errors if surgeons have less than six hours' sleep since their last procedure in the preceding evening and the first surgery the next day. Interns and residents are particularly susceptible to making medical errors, because of their intense work schedule.
For example, studies of medical residents show that they are more than 22 percent more likely to make errors when sleep deprived, as most residents are. Extended shift interns working five or more extended duration shifts per month experienced a record of 300 percent more preventable errors resulting from extreme fatigue.
New 2011 regulations, limiting residents' work hours are targeted to minimize and reduce medical errors. First-year residents now work maximum 16-hour shifts, while second- and third-year residents can only work 28-hour single shifts. This change shows that residents working 16-hour shifts made only half as many errors as those working 24-hour shifts.
Do you support this change in hours for interns and residents? Have you ever suffered the dangerous effects of sleep deprivation?
Source: The Huffington Post, "Doctors Are Human; They Need Sleep," Dr. Michael J. Breus, Nov. 5, 2012