Recently, Rebecca Ulep wrote a rebuke of recent resident duty hour restrictions and their potential negative effects on physician education in a post entitled “When I Was a Resident”: How Duty Hour Rules Are Creating a Lost Generation of Physicians. Many practicing physicians agreed with these sentiments, while most residents did not. Our expanding #PulmCC community brought me into the acquaintance of one the latter, who agreed to write a post taking the other side of the argument. Scroll down for the article, and hit the link above to read the original post. And follow the #PulmCC hashtag on twitter to keep up with relevant material and participate in future #PulmCC twitter chats.
I argue with my father a lot. He works as an intensivist at a community hospital in Indianapolis while I am about to graduate from a highly academic internal medicine program in Chicago. Needless to say, we have very different perspectives.
He sometimes expresses views similar to those written in a previous article, “When I Was a Resident”: How Duty Hour Rules Are Creating a Lost Generation of Physicians. I started residency the first year that the new intern duty-hour regulations were put into effect. After explaining these rules to my father, he asked me: “How do you guys learn? When I was a resident, we did not have limits to how many patients we saw. I would be working until five or six in the evening on my post-call day and then stay to work a moonlighting shift.” I, then, delightfully asked him if that was before or after penicillin was discovered.
The field of medicine has undergone many changes (yet we still carry pagers…that’s for another rant), some for better and some for worse. There has been much debate over potential benefits and detriments that come with the changes in duty-hour regulations. I can only speak to the culture at my own institution, but in my experience, there is one thing that has not changed: the pride we take in our work. This is why I take particular issue with the overly dramatized notions brought up in the aforementioned article. Continue reading ““When I Was a Resident”: Duty Hour Rules Do Not Define Me”