What is it about?
Burnout and fatigue in doctors is exceedingly common and can harm patient care and the quality of our health care systems. New innovative methods of shift scheduling have been developed and tested for this reason. We studied how these newer scheduling models might impact resident doctors' burnout and fatigue in comparison to the traditional models that rely on doctors performing frequent 24-hour shifts. We found that these new models could maintain the same coverage of hospital services, and had less burnout and fatigue in resident doctors compared to the 24-hour shift model.
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Photo by SJ Objio on Unsplash
Why is it important?
In the post-COVID era, optimizing our health care systems and the people who work in it is as important as ever. Doctors who are less burnt out and fatigued will be able to provide better care for patients and creating innovative methods of scheduling doctors' work might be a way to improve their wellness.
Perspectives
In the realm of doctors still in training (resident doctors), it is important to weigh other impacts these scheduling systems might have on their education, and on direct patient care. This is an area that needs further research.
Jack Yuan
University of Alberta
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Burnout and fatigue amongst internal medicine residents: A cross-sectional study on the impact of alternative scheduling models on resident wellness, PLoS ONE, September 2023, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0291457.
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