When medical residents were permitted to work shifts longer than 16 hours, patient mortality was not affected and the doctors themselves did not experience chronic sleep loss, according to a pair of papers published today in the New England Journal of Medicine by a team of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Johns Hopkins University, and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Massachusetts. The study that resulted in the papers follows a 2011 change imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to limit the amount of hours first-year residents could work in a single shift—a cap of 16 hours per day and 80 hours per week—which came in response to concerns about the potential for mistakes to be made by young doctors working long shifts. The results from these studies suggest that those well-intentioned policies were not necessary to protect patients.
* This article was originally published here
