4 ms·

I have bad news for you about health care professionals.

foobarian 3y ago
I have worse news for you about grad students.
542458 3y ago
Health care professionals is a weird one, because while long shifts are dangerous, patient handover is also dangerous and there may be an argument that longer shifts means fewer handovers which could result in better patient outcomes.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  Would we accept this if they were dealing with nukes, rather than people? Yeah we let people who haven't had sleep in 36 hours handle the nukes because having the people involved talk to each other between shifts is hard.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- anon-3988 3y ago
  That just means that doctors need to handle fewer patients.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Fewer patients doesn't necessarily get the patients they are handling out the door faster.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  They do know roughly how long it takes to take care of a patient & should be set up with overlapping shifts and to be winding down towards a normal shift (i.e. no new patients) so that there's no handoff of a single patient but no one is working long hours. Some patients might take longer than a single shift, but handoff is inevitable at some point. You can improve your handoff processes but you can't improve the decision making of someone working a 12 hour shift.
  - galangalalgol 3y ago
    Is this maybe one of those "if something is hard, do it more often" things?
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      Maybe but I won't claim to know how to quantify things to evaluate proposals. I do know that even in tech with low stakes, hand off is a problem. I recall hearing teams trying to do 3 on-call teams in 3 different timezones and the team requested to scale back to 2 with longer hours because of the handoff problem (& these hand-offs were occurring daily).
- sasaf5 3y ago
  I would prefer fewer patients per doctor then. It seems that the problem is due to the limited supply of doctors. In both countries where I lived, supply of doctors was artificially limited by regulation.

I have worse news for you about grad students.

Health care professionals is a weird one, because while long shifts are dangerous, patient handover is also dangerous and there may be an argument that longer shifts means fewer handovers which could result in better patient outcomes.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago
Would we accept this if they were dealing with nukes, rather than people? Yeah we let people who haven't had sleep in 36 hours handle the nukes because having the people involved talk to each other between shifts is hard.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
anon-3988 3y ago
That just means that doctors need to handle fewer patients.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  Fewer patients doesn't necessarily get the patients they are handling out the door faster.
vlovich123 3y ago
They do know roughly how long it takes to take care of a patient & should be set up with overlapping shifts and to be winding down towards a normal shift (i.e. no new patients) so that there's no handoff of a single patient but no one is working long hours. Some patients might take longer than a single shift, but handoff is inevitable at some point. You can improve your handoff processes but you can't improve the decision making of someone working a 12 hour shift.
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  Is this maybe one of those "if something is hard, do it more often" things?
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Maybe but I won't claim to know how to quantify things to evaluate proposals. I do know that even in tech with low stakes, hand off is a problem. I recall hearing teams trying to do 3 on-call teams in 3 different timezones and the team requested to scale back to 2 with longer hours because of the handoff problem (& these hand-offs were occurring daily).
sasaf5 3y ago
I would prefer fewer patients per doctor then. It seems that the problem is due to the limited supply of doctors. In both countries where I lived, supply of doctors was artificially limited by regulation.