Doctors Are Posting Pictures of Themselves Asleep at Work to Highlight Grueling Schedules
They say a picture is worth a thousand words…which could then turn into thousands and thousands of tweets. (Photo: Twitter)
It all started a few weeks ago when a patient at a hospital in Mexico snapped a photo of a junior doctor sound asleep during her overnight shift.
Here it is:
(Photo: tutoblogx.blogspot.mx)
This patient posted the picture on a blog, followed by this comment: “We are aware that this is a tiring job but doctors are obliged to do their work. There are dozens of patients in need of attention.”
Doctors in Mexico were outraged and felt compelled to defend this young physician, along with everyone in their profession, given their ongoing state of fatigue due to extended work shifts. And with the creation of one hashtag — #yotambienmedormi (“I’ve also fallen asleep”), medical professionals from around the world have jumped on the social media firestorm.
Scott Mabbutt, a 29-year-old surgical registrar in Yorkshire, UK, was one of the doctors who took to twitter after reading the piece on the BBC News.. “Before graduating as a doctor, I worked as a volunteer in Mexico,” he tells Yahoo Health.
“I know that the doctors there work very hard and have less protection from employment law than we do in Europe. Grabbing what might be the only 30 minutes of sleep in 48 hours of caring for patients by resting your head on a desk is something I have done myself, and I was upset that a doctor could be getting into trouble for it.”
Mabbutt adds that “doctors in the press are sometimes painted as being lazy or money hungry, but I wanted to tweet to show that this isn’t the case. The vast majority of doctors care so much about their patients that they stay up all night and all the next day caring for them.”
According to the American Medical Association (AMA), the average physician in America works between 40 to 60 hours each week, yet about 25 percent of doctors work up to 80 hours during any given week. Also established in this report—about half of the physicians regardless of their age would prefer to work fewer hours.
However, the issue of resident physicians suffering from chronic sleep deprivation has been researched. In 2012, the Mayo Clinic concluded that poor sleep quality during 24-hour shifts resulted in lack of performance and safety “causing potentially adverse implications for patient care.” Also, a previous study published in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety reported the following statistics regarding physicians-in-training:
They have twice as many attentional failures when working overnight and commit 36 percent more serious medical errors.
They reported making 300 percent more fatigue-related medical errors when working overnight that lead to a patient’s death.
They suffered 61 percent more needle stick and other sharp injuries after their 20th consecutive hour of work.
It’s no secret that sleep deprivation is an issue in the US. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have declared chronic lack of sleep as a “public health epidemic,” where sleep insufficiency has been linked to numerous accidents, including “medical and other occupational errors.”
But perhaps there is something to be said about taking a power nap. After all, a recent study from Saarland University in Germany discovered that a one-hour nap can greatly enhance memory performance—especially for those who are in the process of acquiring knowledge. “A short nap at the office or in school is enough to significantly improve learning success,” stated lead researcher professor Axel Mecklinger in a formal press release. “Wherever people are in a learning environment, we should think seriously about the positive effects of sleep.”
Mabbutt is all in favor of the on-the-job nap. “Sometimes whilst on a busy on call, a little sleep can make the difference between an alert doctor and a dangerous one,” he says.
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