ACGME officially ends the 16 hour intern duty limit

[SylvianAqueduct]

Any thoughts on the impact that no more 16 hour intern duty limit regulations will make on neurosurgery residency? As a medical student, I obviously do not have any first-hand experience with residency duty hours but I'm interested to hear what perspective you all have on this. 

Here's a link to the pdf by the ACGME: http://www.acgme.org/Portals/0/PDFs/Nasc...-10-17.pdf

Here are a couple reddit pages with the current discussion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/commen...limit_for/
https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/c...k_24_hour/

Some people seem to really like the idea, and some people are VERY opposed to it.

[Guest]

(03-10-2017, 03:04 PM)SylvianAqueduct Wrote: Any thoughts on the impact that no more 16 hour intern duty limit regulations will make on neurosurgery residency? As a medical student, I obviously do not have any first-hand experience with residency duty hours but I'm interested to hear what perspective you all have on this. 

Here's a link to the pdf by the ACGME: http://www.acgme.org/Portals/0/PDFs/Nasc...-10-17.pdf

Here are a couple reddit pages with the current discussion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/commen...limit_for/
https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/c...k_24_hour/

Some people seem to really like the idea, and some people are VERY opposed to it.

Organized neurosurgery in general has shown a lot of opposition to duty hour restrictions because there is no evidence that they improve patient outcomes, and there is suspicion that it is detrimental to continuity of care and decreases resident training hours overall, possibly creating a generation of residents with less technical proficiency. 

A lot of programs waste a lot of intern year rotating on non-neurosurgical services, so how much this will affect anyone really depends on where they train. 

It's not going to affect overall hours worked in the week, so another thing to consider is whether a lot of interesting cases get done overnight at a program- that is, whether this means an extra 8 hours of answering pages or another couple cases to get your hands dirty.

In any case, intern year is one of seven or more and these rules don't apply to PGY-2 and up so in the grand scheme of a career there's no reason to lose sleep or let this make a significant impact on your decision making. If shorter shifts mean a lot then I hear ER doctors are super happy.*

*when they're not busy having the highest burnout and suicide rate of all the specialties