Efforts to reduce US trainees’ hours were ineffective, study says

Attempts to reduce the number of hours worked by physicians in residency training failed to improve their working and sleeping hours, and fatigue related errors were unchanged, a study to evaluate the effects of limiting working hours in US medical centres has found.

The prospective study reported the experience of 220 residents at three major US paediatric centres—the Children’s Hospital in Boston, the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC, and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital of Stanford Medical School in Palo Alto, California—before and after new rules on working hours were implemented (Pediatrics 2008;122:250-8).

“The study did not show that errors occurred despite reduced hours; rather, it showed that the effort to …