Resident Work Hours

As some readers may or may not know, medical school training programs have dramatically changed over the past 5-10 years related to resident work hours. All programs have limitations on how much and how often residents can work and be on-call.

According to a recent article in the July 23 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, most internal medicine faculty members believe that decreased resident duty-hours have had adverse effects on both residents and faculty.

The study from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn. surveyed 111 key clinical faculty from 39 internal medicine residency programs and came up with these conclusions.

Although 50 percent of the faculty believed that decreased duty-hours had improved the residents' well-being, strong majorities agreed that it had compromised the residents' continuity of care (87 percent), physician-patient relationships (75 percent), education (66 percent) and professionalism (73 percent).

Many of them also agreed that the reduced workload for residents had increased their own workload (47 percent), and decreased their satisfaction with teaching (56 percent), decreased their ability to develop relationships with residents (40 percent), and decreased their overall career satisfaction (31 percent).

Faculty burnout could lead to further problems in getting quality instructors to teach the residents as they train.

Once again, more studies will be done.