January 16, 2005

Medical Interns and Sleep

Jen and I were talking about this a few days ago... Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution writes about Medical Mistakes and sleepless Interns: bq. Medical mistakes More people die from medical mistakes each year than from highway accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS and yet physicians still resist and the public does not demand even simple reforms. bq. The New England Journal of Medicine, for example, has just published another study, as if we needed it, showing that interns who are kept awake for 30 hours straight are a danger to themselves and innocent bystanders as well as to patients:
Researchers found that interns more than doubled their risk of getting into a car accident after being on call, a stint that meant working for 32 consecutive hours with only two or three hours of sleep, on average. Interns were also nearly six times as likely to report nearly having an accident on their way home.
I wonder if there is ever going to be a reform... Posted by DaveH at January 16, 2005 3:09 PM