Editor,
Your report “UNMH residents face 24-hour shifts” (Daily Lobo, 3/27/17) does not mention a big reason for resident stress: the shortage of residents at any given hour in a hospital. This makes many residents overloaded, and likely to cause medical errors. One way hospitals are trying to increase the number of residents on hand is by extending the shift length. This is going to result in greater fatigue, and therefore more medical errors.
Unfortunately, the dangerous machismo accruing from some sort of initiation rite by working long hours for freshly-minted MDs in hospitals is just going to get some of them to push themselves even further and not “self-assess” and “ask for help” if understandably fatigued.
Other residents may just want to do a single 28-hour shift for their own and family’s convenience in how much time they get to continuously spend for home life, etc. Hospitals too are this way going more with their own convenience, claiming more “efficiency”. All this at the expense of patient safety.
Arun Ahuja
UNM student
