There are two reasons that I’ve heard: 1. It’s financial. At 40K / year, residents are cheap labor. Where else but in a hospital can you have someone work for 80 hours/week at that salary? Just tell them they are getting “trained” and that there is no other way to get a medical license. It’s indentured servitude. Others would argue that we do the most training of doctors in the world (true) which then gives us the best doctors, too. The icing on the cake? Tell a resident that it’s an honor to be “chief resident” (great for the resume! works really well on overachievers) – and get them to stay on voluntarily for another year at the same low rate 2. There is a statistic that says that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of people admitted to hospitals are discharged within the first 36 hours. So keeping a resident working for 36 hours (now 30) enables a large number of patients to be seen consistently by the same physician until they are released, thereby lessening the chance for errors in transitioning large numbers of patients to other physicians. (At the beginning of a shift, a resident starts by admitting new patients and then following them, along with some transitions). This has been the party line for a long time, I have no idea if it’s true. There is a lesser of two evils somewhere in here.
What is the upside to them working these long hours? Who does this benefit? They must have some reason for doing it.
There are two reasons that I’ve heard: 1. It’s financial. At 40K / year, residents are cheap labor. Where else but in a hospital can you have someone work for 80 hours/week at that salary? Just tell them they are getting “trained” and that there is no other way to get a medical license. It’s indentured servitude. Others would argue that we do the most training of doctors in the world (true) which then gives us the best doctors, too. The icing on the cake? Tell a resident that it’s an honor to be “chief resident” (great for the resume! works really well on overachievers) – and get them to stay on voluntarily for another year at the same low rate 2. There is a statistic that says that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of people admitted to hospitals are discharged within the first 36 hours. So keeping a resident working for 36 hours (now 30) enables a large number of patients to be seen consistently by the same physician until they are released, thereby lessening the chance for errors in transitioning large numbers of patients to other physicians. (At the beginning of a shift, a resident starts by admitting new patients and then following them, along with some transitions). This has been the party line for a long time, I have no idea if it’s true. There is a lesser of two evils somewhere in here.
Thanks for the informative reply MH!