by Trapper John
I was listening to All Things Considered last night with my flu-wracked wife, when we heard a piece about a lawsuit against a medical resident who'd just finished a 36-hour hospital shift. The resident in question, zonked out after an absurdly long shift, rear-ended a college student and caused the student massive, unrepairable brain damage. There was a weird tenor to the story, which focused on the safety aspects of residents driving home after pulling two-day shifts -- it was almost an afterthought when one of the commenters mentioned how incredibly unsafe it is to force medical doctors to diagnose patients, prescribe and administer meds, and generally be responsible for the well-being of sick people when the doctors have been rendered incompetent by fatigue. As the NPR sidebar notes, "[i]nterns working 30-hour shifts in an intensive care unit made 36 percent more serious medical errors, including 5.6 times more serious diagnostic errors, as compared to those same interns when they were scheduled to work no more than 16 consecutive hours." I don't mean to downplay the tragedy of auto accidents caused by sleep-driving residents and interns, but it seems to me that the bigger problem here is that our teaching hospitals expect doctors to care for patients on no sleep. As the American Medical Student Association points out, we don't let truckers drive for more than 10 hours straight -- why the hell would we let doctors work longer than that in our hospitals?
Anyway, the NPR piece featured a representative from the Committee of Interns and Residents, the labor union that's had a good deal of success in organizing residents across the US. The CIR rep spoke about the dangers to both motorists and patients caused by our archaic and willfully stupid overwork of residents and interns. As my wife and I nodded approvingly, I said something like, "Yeah, the CIR is doing a good job -- but I bet that the NLRB is going to build on their decision that university TAs can't organize, and screw interns and residents too."
Call me Carnac. I open the BNA Daily Labor Report this morning (subscription only, alas), and what do I see? (Answer below the fold!)