Opinion

Sleep deprivation among physicians is hardly limited to residents

LETTER — Posted Feb. 26, 2007

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Regarding "Fatal errors more likely on 24-hour call" (Article, Jan. 22): It is with a sense of supreme irony that I read studies that document the effects of sleep deprivation on residents' patient care. The co-author of the Harvard study notes that "academic medicine is failing these doctors and their patients by requiring exhausted doctors to work 30 hours straight."

I hate to tell you, but here, outside of the ivory tower, a large number of us are doing just that on a day-to-day basis, and while our clinical judgment is probably better honed than that of the average first-year resident, our need for sleep is no different.

As medicine shifts to a "hospitalist" and "outpatient" doctor paradigm, and the residents in training and even those in practice demand a "better lifestyle" than their predecessors, those of us still trying to provide a full spectrum of office and hospital-based coverage for our patients are certainly feeling the effects of 24, 36 or more hours of sleep deprivation every week.

While residency ends in three years, my retirement is nowhere in the short term, and the future is looking even dimmer with each progressive hour of lost sleep. It's no wonder job satisfaction for the average primary care physician is so low.

I sincerely hope that my patients fare a bit better from my blurry-eyed decisions than those in the Harvard study did. Perhaps turning attention to the practice of medicine in the real world would help in developing practice models that would serve both the patients and the doctors equally well.

Laura Kornegay, MD, Lexington, Va.

Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2007/02/26/edlt0226.htm.

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