Doctor-Patient Relationship

Sleep versus Training: The NY Times on Surgical Work Hours

Pauline Chen at the NY Times Blog has an article on cut backs on the number of hours of training for young surgeons. According to her story: “For the past decade, in response to increasing pressure from politicians, unions and sleep experts, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the organization responsible for accrediting American…

Pauline Chen at the NY Times Blog has an article on cut backs on the number of hours of training for young surgeons.

According to her story:

“For the past decade, in response to increasing pressure from politicians, unions and sleep experts, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the organization responsible for accrediting American medical and surgical training programs, has been working to cap the hours that residents work. In 2011 the council passed the strictest limits yet. To maintain their accreditation, residency training programs had to abide by a 22-page set of scheduling rules that limited all in-hospital work including any elective “moonlighting” jobs to 80 hours per week, mandated the number of hours “free of duty” after different “duty periods” (eight hours off after 16-hour duty periods and 14 hours off after 24-hour duty periods) and even specified the timing of “strategic napping” in no uncertain terms (after 16 hours of continuous duty and between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.).

While most residency programs chafed under the exhaustively detailed regulations, surgical training programs had particular difficulty adopting the new mandates. For nearly a century, surgical residency had been a period of both intensive experience and increasing responsibility under the guidance of more experienced surgeons. More recent research has affirmed that approach, demonstrating the strong link between a surgeon’s operative skill, the number of operations performed and patient outcomes. With limits set on their time at the hospital, young surgeons-in-training had fewer opportunities to care for patients or scrub in on operations. While previous generations of trainees had the luxury of participating in at least one operation a day, new trainees had only enough time to be involved in two or maybe three operations each week.

Calculating the number of hours “lost” by cutting back on in-hospital time, surgical leaders estimated that young surgeons-to-be were now missing out on as much as a year’s worth of experience”

She relies heavily on an new Annals of Surgery Article, wherein, as Chen reports,

“Researchers sent questionnaires to the directors of subspecialty fellowship training programs and asked them to comment on the bedside and operating skills of the young surgeons enrolling in their programs. These fellowships are a kind of high-level and often prestigious surgical “gap year” where young surgeons who have completed the basic five-year surgery residency can delay independent practice to pursue an additional year or two of training.

The results were abysmal. Fewer than half of the young surgeons could operate or make clinical decisions on their own. Nearly a third of them were incapable of performing even the most basic operations like a gallbladder removal on their own. And a quarter were unable to recognize the early signs of complications.

Even in areas of surgery where the young surgeons had had supplementary online learning modules during their residency, they performed poorly, with more than half unable to perform basic maneuvers.”

While acknowledging that “some observers have criticized the study for being self-serving – most respondents also noted that the young surgeons’ deficiencies resolved after additional training under their auspices —” Chen’s article reads largely as an attack on these new residency work hour rules.

Since I have written on the subject of these residency work hour rules with sleep specialists earlier this year in the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, it may be unsurprising that I take a somewhat different view.

First, as we note in our article, it is not clear these new rules are actually being enforced. In regard to the prior 2003 round of rules we note

“well-documented non-compliance with the ACGME’s 2003 work hour rules, and the ACGME’s history of non-enforcement. In a nationwide cohort study, 84% of interns were found to violate the ACGME’s 2003 standards in the year following their introduction.3 Subsequent studies have found falsification of work hour reports to the ACGME to be commonplace. The ACGME itself ultimately acknowledged the problem, following a report to the director by of a group of 30 of its resident physician delegates that “to a person, without question… most residents do systematically under represent the number of times they violate [the 24-hour + 6 hour shift limit] standard.” Our article was all about how the law might ensure better compliance with the new standards, but as of now I know of no evidence that these standards are being complied with to a much greater extent that we can blame them for whatever deficiencies Chen sees.

Second, Chen’s article seems to me to rely on a bit of a false construct. All things being equal of course we would rather surgeons have more training before practicing on their own. But not all things are equal. There are manpower costs that are ultimately passed on to patients by way of increased costs and/or shortages of available surgeons. More pertinently, though, I think is the concern that motivated these rules in the first place: sleep deprivation leads to errors, which leads to patient injuries. The question is how to set the optimal balance between the negative effects of sleep deprivation and negative effects of reduced training time.  In formulating their policy the ACGME considered exactly these types of questions, but to read Chen’s article you would think (incorrectly) that the goal was to maximize one variable (training) rather than optimize across a series of variables.

Still, all that said, I am grateful to Chen and the N.Y. Times for drawing attention to this important issue.