Excerpt from Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News (Shorter Workweeks for Interns Do Not Promote Patient Safety) :

A policy to shorten the workweek for interns in the United States has failed to improve their quality of life and has possibly put patients at greater risk for medical errors, a new study has found (Sen S et al. JAMA Intern Med 2013;173:657-662).

The 2011 policy change, recommended by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, capped at 16 continuous hours the longest shift a first-year resident could work in the hope that doing so would ease the strain on physician trainees.

But although the new rules have shortened the typical intern’s workweek from 67 to 64.3 hours, they haven’t encouraged residents to sleep more, helped them to avoid depression or increased their overall sense of well-being, the study found…The study was based on email surveys of 2,323 residents …entered training in 2009, 2010 and 2011, after the rule change.

“Given that increased sleep was a key [mechanism] through which the new duty-hour restrictions were intended to improve the health of residents, the lack of such an effect in the postimplementation cohort in our study is a cause for concern,” wrote the authors, led by Srijan Sen, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Designing work schedules that account for circadian phase and explicitly training residents on practices to increase sleep time and improve sleep quality may be necessary.”