Irritation and Missing the Point

This past week has been the most awful week in my life. I may write about the things I heard and saw at some point in time (and I should do it while the memory is still fairly fresh) but I'd like to complain about an article I read in the Washington Post instead, because it will make me feel better.

It was an article about cutting down the hours for residents and interns in hospitals. Administrators don't like it, older doctors don't like it, no on likes it except for the interns and residents because it means they don't have to work as many hours. The older doctors say the millenials are lazy, too focused on having a life outside of medicine. The administrators (one of whom quoted Malcolm Gladwell) said that people need 10,000 hours to learn something and with the hours of interns and residents being cut, they would not be learning. The interns and residents say they like working more normal hours and seeing their families.

People, are we missing the point? Here's the point: these rules were put into place because once a person has gone 24 hours without sleep, they are the equivalent of being legally drunk. Seriously, would you want to see a doctor who had been on his or her feet for the last 24 hours? Really? These laws were put into place exactly to avoid that because interns and residents who worked so many hours in a row were making mistakes. It's not a matter of learning or of following a patient for hours on end (another argument of the pro-120 hours per-week crowd), it's a matter of a doctor seeing a patient who has had enough rest to make an intelligent diagnosis. Please don't say they have to work 120 hours a week or they won't learn or saying they're lazy and entitled because they don't want to do it. Look at the reason behind why these guidelines were put into place and comment on that. The Post article got absolutely no other point of view as to why this was happening and never even asked the administrator about sleep-deprivation in interns and residents and whether it affected their judgement. It was all "Oh no, they don't want to work 120 hours a week, those lazy kids. How will they ever learn?". Maybe if the hospital got hit with a multi-million dollar lawsuit because a resident make a poor decision because they had been awake for the past 2 days they would change their tune-and the Post would ask a few more questions.