Medical Resident Hours

Medical residency directors skeptical of proposed duty-hour recommendations.
The Wall Street Journal (3/1, Hobson, subscription required) "Health Blog" reported that, according to a study published in the March issue of the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, the recently proposed and approved rules limiting medical residents' workday to 16 hours are not finding favor among directors of medical residency programs. After analyzing responses from 464 directors of residency programs in the fields of pediatric and general surgery, as well as internal medicine, researchers found that most respondents believed that the proposed new workday limits would not only hamper continuous patient care and affect communication during patient hand-off between clinicians, but would also get in the way of overall patient care coordination.