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Work Hour Restrictions Protect Patients From Sleepy Surgeons

Surgery Residency, Massachusetts General Hospital and Work Limits – Health Blog – WSJ

It’s not surprising that newly minted doctors at one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country, and in a specialty with a particularly demanding residency, have been violating national limits on work hours.

But the Boston Globe’s report that Massachusetts General Hospital must rein in surgical residents’ hours is a reminder that the work limits put in place several years ago remain unpopular with many residents and senior doctors.

Not surprising in the least.  I’m actually astonished that there’s anybody with the chutzpah to defend extended work hours for residents.   I did my residency largely in the pre-hour-restriction era — there were hour restrictions on months in the ER, but effectively none for the off-service rotations — and it was a terrible way to deliver care.  I did my time of q3 call in the units and q2 call on surgical services.  This includes a memorable time when I was the sole intern on the pediatric surgical service and was on duty for ten days straight without leaving the hospital.  That gives a new meaning to being a “resident physician!”  (Actually, that’s the original meaning, if you must get picky about it.)

The care provided was just scary.  I prided myself on being a machine and able to get through 36 hours of uninterrupted work without cracking; I used to run marathons and endurance was my forte.  And I did get through it better than most.  But after 24 hours with no down time (and there was never meaningful down time), you get stupid, and you make mistakes.  I remember once, in the medical ICU I was surprised in morning rounds to find that one of my patients had had a swann-ganz catheter placed overnight.  Caught flat-footed by this in front of the attending, I asked the nurse who had put in a swann without telling me, only to be informed that I had done the procedure! Apparently I was too sleep-addled to recall that I had done it!  Fortunately, I had apparently done it right, because a swann involves threading a catheter through the heart into the pulmonary vessels and can be Very Bad [tm] if you screw it up.   But I apparently did it by reflex without actually achieving a state of full wakefulness.  This sort of thing was fairly routine, and I also remember well the overnight residents being excoriated in morning rounds for the errors and misjudgments they had made overnight.  Great training, but not so great for the patients who were the victims of the mistakes.

It seems to me that the defenders of the status quo have donned their rose-colored glasses.  They fondly remember the camaraderie and the pride in accomplishment that their residencies evoked, while conveniently forgetting the mistakes and omissions, while neglecting the depression and divorces and other personal costs of such an abusive training environment.  And there’s the faux toughness: “I got through it, they can, too if they’re not too weak.”  And the old guard romanticize the qualities of the “true physician” in their dedication to their patients above all else: “These younger doctors just don’t care enough.”

What a load of crap.

Look, it’s with damn good cause that other professions in which errors can hurt people have work time restrictions (truck drivers, airline pilots, etc), and it’s stupid and arrogant to think that we physicians are so awesome that we are immune to the human factors of fatigue and circadian rhythms that contribute to errors.  When it’s inexperienced trainees working the ridiculous hours with minimal supervision (in many cases), the potential for fatigue-related errors is compounded.

I also question the motivations of some of those who defend the status quo.  It seems strangely self-serving that residency directors who would otherwise have to find attending physicians or PAs to perform the work that residents do on the government’s dime are the ones to insist that the situation is just fine, or that “the evidence of benefit is lacking.”  How cool is it that they can ignore reams of research on human factors, take the a priori position that the system is fine as it is, and demand formal evidence on “efficacy, safety and cost” before making any changes?  That’s balls!  It’s also fairly blatant obstructionism and should not be given any credence.

Dr Bob of Medrants has some thoughtful comments on the matter, mostly pleading for flexibility in the new rules. I would mostly agree, excepting that flexibility is best given to those who have proven themselves trustworthy, and residency directors (especially but not exclusively of surgical training programs) have repeatedly and flagrantly flouted the rules thus far imposed.   Flexibility is fine, but accountability should also be demanded.

I would also take issue with Dr Bob’s comment that this “training system that has served our profession well for many years.”  I look at the statistics on physician burnout, substance abuse, divorce, depression and suicide.  They are terribly concerning.  I would not lay all of this at the feet of residency, but I would say that the abusive (I’m sorry, “rigorous”) environment of residency training sets the tone for the culture of machismo that harms physicians as much as it harms patients.  Nobody is well-served by the current system.

It is true that change might be painful.  Reducing hours might mean reducing patient contacts and reducing the training opportunities for physicians.  This might require academic centers to revalue the time of physicians in training, by which I mean that residents might no longer be used as free menial laborers.  Maybe it doesn’t make sense to have a surgical resident “running the book” — many surgical residents never see the inside of the OR till their second and third years.  The universities might have to hire PAs or NPs for the “scut work” instead of using MDs in training as glorified secretaries (what a waste of time and money).

I’m glad the Institue of Medicine and the ACGME seem to be on the right path with the recommendations.  The reactionary response from the change-resistant academic centers will take some time and political will to overcome. I remember when they first imposed the rules, they followed it up by decertifying the Internal Medicine program at Hopkins for violating the rules.  That effected the desired change, I can tell you!   Hopefully, as the restrictions evolve, there will be accountability and enforcement until the culture starts to shift.

*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*

Some of My Best Friends Are Doctors

Steven Pearlstein actually wrote that in the Washington Post on Wednesday, right after (another) long rant against physicians.  At the end, he offers doctors an olive branch.  Or maybe its an offer he thinks doctors can’t refuse:

The choice for doctors now is quite clear: They can agree to give up a modest amount of autonomy and income, embrace more collaboration in the way they practice medicine and take their rightful place at the center of a reform effort that will allow them to focus more on patient care.  Or they can continue to blame everyone else and remain — stubbornly — a part of the problem.

After reading Pearlstein’s columns, I’m still sure not why he has such a problem with doctors.  I am beginning to think it’s because he just misunderstands them.

Pearlstein is convinced that doctors go into medicine for the same reasons investment bankers go to Wall Street: to make money.

Docs seem to take it as a given that physicians in the United States should earn twice as much as doctors in the rest of the world — and five times more than their patients, on average.  Mention these facts and you are guaranteed to get a lecture about the crushing debt burden that young docs face upon completion of their medical training.  Offer to trade free medical education for a 20 percent reduction in physician fees, and you won’t find many takers.

Pearlstein has no source for these claims, but let’s assume they’re true, and do the math.  The government says that there are 633,000 doctors in the United States, and they earned median salaries between $135,000 and $320,000 a year.  If we take a number in the middle — say $200,000 — that means that American doctors earn about $125 billion a year.  A big number, but total health care expenses in the United States are over $2 trillion, which means doctors represent about 5% of the total.  Can physician salaries really be driving our health care problems?

It seems unlikely.  But Pearlstein is desperate for it to be true, so he keeps trying to discount all of the other possible causes of our problems as examples of conspiracies or arrogance or sloppiness:

For example, medical malpractice litigation is a problem…

But one of the reasons malpractice suits are still necessary is because doctors have transformed local professional review boards, which are supposed to protect patients, into nothing more than mutual protection societies

The “infelixible bureaucratic processes” that insurers impose are a problem….

But given that there is overwhelming evidence that doctors tend to order up tests, perform surgeries and prescribe treatments whose costs far outweigh the benefits, you can hardly blame the insurers.

We think it is good to have  “clever and creative” doctors…..

but . . . we could all have better health at a lower cost if docs were less inclined toward the medical equivalent of the diving catch and simply were more disciplined about kneeling down for routine ground balls.

Doctors should be applauded for embracing evidence-based medicine…

however, practicing  physicians still think that nothing should interfere with the sacred right of doctors and patients to make all medical decisions, even when they are wrong.

Pearlstein’s views on how doctors think are fundamentally flawed.  He thinks of them like stock brokers, pushing questionable stock to make commissions for themselves.  He’s thought of all the different ways doctors are abusing the system to their own advantage, but he doesn’t seem to have thought that maybe, possibly, he’s wrong.

So, yes, some doctors abuse the privilege of being asked to help their patients.  But the overwhelming majority don’t.  They want to spend as much time as they can with their patients, collecting information, thinking about their problem, and offering good, sound advice.  They are bothered by the involvement of the insurance company or the government or the plaintiff’s lawyer not because they believe they have a “sacred right” to total independence.  Or because they think the way to fix health care is to give them “free rein to treat their patients . . . run the hospitals and set their own fees.”

No, it is because these things actually interfere with the doctor’s ability to think, process and decide with their patient on the right things to do.

Pearlstein and other would-be reformers of our health care system need to reconsider their assumptions on what motivates doctors.  Maybe it’s something Pearlstein should ask some of his friends about.

*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*

The Friday Funny: Double Standards & Sleep Deprivation

drowsyroad

Ezra Klein: Missing The Point

Ezra opines a bit on the role of doctors in health care with the strangely misleading headline: Listen to Atul Gawande: Insurers Aren’t the Problem in Health Care

This wasn’t Gawande’s point at all, and is something quite tangential to Klein’s point:

The reason most Americans hate insurers is because they say “no” to things. “No” to insurance coverage, “no” to a test, “no” to a treatment.   But whatever the problems with saying “no,” what makes our health-care system costly is all the times when we say “yes.” And insurers are virtually never the ones behind a “yes.” They don’t prescribe you treatments. They don’t push you towards MRIs or angioplasties. Doctors are behind those questions, and if you want a cheaper health-care system, you’re going to have to focus on their behavior.

Yes, doctors are a driver — one of many — in the exponentially increasing cost of health care.  Utilization is uneven, not linked to quality or outcomes in many cases, and may often be driven by physicians’ personal economic interests.  All of this is not news, though certainly Atul Gawande wove it together masterfully in his recent New Yorker article.  (I’m assuming you’ve all read it — If not, then stop reading this drivel and go read it immediately.) Nobody disputes that doctors’ behavior (and ideally their reimbursement formula) need to change if effective cost control will be brought to bear on the system.

But it’s completely off-base to claim that insurers aren’t one of the problems in the current system.  There are two crises unfolding in American health care — a fiscal crisis and an access crisis.  I would argue that insurers are less significant as a driver of cost than they are as a barrier to access.  Overall, insurers have, I think, only a marginal effect on cost growth, largely due to the friction they introduce to the system — paperwork, hassles & redundancy and internal costs such as executive compensation, advertising and profits.  It would be great if this could be reduced, but it wouldn’t fix the escalation in costs, only defer the crisis for a few years until cost growth caught up to today’s level.  In the wonk parlance, it wouldn’t “bend the cost curve,” just step it down a bit.

But as for access to care, insurers are the biggest problem.  It’s not their “fault” per se in that they are simply rational actors in the system as it’s currently designed.  Denying care, rescinding policies, aggressive underwriting and cost-shifting are the logical responses of profit-making organizations to the market and its regulatory structure. Fixing this broken insurance system will not contain costs, but it will begin to address the human cost of the 47 million people whose only access to health care is to come to see me in the ER.

*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*

The Friday Funny: The Physician Shortage

docontv

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