I understand the sentiment but it’s not really helpful. They’re still the ones on call, they need to talk to you, and will be writing your orders and things anyways. Not really like they can just say, oh yeah I am tired I’ll just go home and sleep and abandon all these patients here, why didn’t I think of that?
Helpful things would be writing congressmen and senators about reform to the residency system, supporting unionization efforts. Change will only come if forced from above or if residents get more of a say. Ideal situation in my mind would be a more typical work schedule capped at closer to 50 hours a week, maybe with increased residency training time overall and increased pay during that time to compensate (need to keep up with cripplingly high student loan debt for those who didn’t have wealthy parents who payed for medical school).
Even attending physicians will really need to start unionizing if they don’t want to get totally lost in the shuffle, since they’re mostly employed directly now instead of running their own practices or specialty group, they get very little say in how things are done.
I’m imagining that I might just leave and try either a different place, or treat it myself. One can’t blame a doctor for “choosing” to be up so long that they’ll make an understandable but deadly mistake.
Is it rude to start asking them how long they’ve been up? I don’t even want medical advice from someone who’s been up 28 hours.
I understand the sentiment but it’s not really helpful. They’re still the ones on call, they need to talk to you, and will be writing your orders and things anyways. Not really like they can just say, oh yeah I am tired I’ll just go home and sleep and abandon all these patients here, why didn’t I think of that?
Helpful things would be writing congressmen and senators about reform to the residency system, supporting unionization efforts. Change will only come if forced from above or if residents get more of a say. Ideal situation in my mind would be a more typical work schedule capped at closer to 50 hours a week, maybe with increased residency training time overall and increased pay during that time to compensate (need to keep up with cripplingly high student loan debt for those who didn’t have wealthy parents who payed for medical school).
Even attending physicians will really need to start unionizing if they don’t want to get totally lost in the shuffle, since they’re mostly employed directly now instead of running their own practices or specialty group, they get very little say in how things are done.
I’m imagining that I might just leave and try either a different place, or treat it myself. One can’t blame a doctor for “choosing” to be up so long that they’ll make an understandable but deadly mistake.