Patient safety is at the crux of this discussion. With added pressure under the Affordable Care Act to reduce medical errors, the cap on work hours has come under recent scrutiny as some suggest that it has done little to reduce errors.
“Restricting resident duty hours has had the unintended consequence of substantially increasing the number of hand-offs or transitions of care for patients,” Ana Pujols McKee, MD, CMO of The Joint Commission, said in a letter to the graduate medical education council. The Joint Commission, asserts that hand-offs and communication errors remain one of the leading causes of sentinel events, according to Forbes.
Others, however, believe there to be a dearth of evidence meriting the overturn of hours cap and believe them to ultimately be beneficiary.
Michael Carome, director of Public Citizen’s health research group, told Forbes, “The most rigorous trial to date of the effects of different work shift lengths found that reducing first-year residents’ shifts to 16 hours or less reduced the frequency of serious medical errors.”
Whatever recommendations the ACGME settles upon for resident duty hours will be posted in April for public comment. Changes would be implemented within the next year.
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