I Prefer Cocaine, Thanks
Weird medical suggestion of the month. Australian doctors are being told to drink coffee in order to stay awake on 80 hour shifts. Or take 400mg caffeine (the equivalent of six cups of coffee). Or snort half a gram of cocaine…
Honestly, have these people not heard of sleep? Working 80 hours in one go will kill patients. It doesn’t matter if you take caffeine, cocaine or even methamphetamine to keep going, eventually, after about 48 hours, your brain will cease all higher functions and become entirely automatic. At that point, any patient presenting with unusual symptoms will have those symptoms either ignored or misinterpreted. This is an established fact.
The only remedy for this is sleep. Curiously, a single hour’s worth of sleep is the equivalent of several cups of coffee in the staying awake stakes, but it takes at least 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep in 24 hours to maintain a reasonable level of functioning. This is because you need a certain amount of REM sleep to restore functionality to the brain. Sleep cycles are usually about 90 minutes long, and you need at least three of them to restore some semblance of order to your frazzled brain…
Hospitals would be much better off scheduling short naps for their doctors, with at least one 4-6 hour sleep break, than advocating stimulants.
Of course, a much better solution would be to employ more doctors, so that they do not have to work such absurdly long shifts.
Curiously, it seems that the proposed solution for this is that the Rudd government will take control of all the state hospitals, making a federal health system. Given the state of the British NHS, I am puzzled as to why they think this might work. An Australian National Health System is not going to miraculously find extra doctors and more funding.
The most obvious solution, is to allow all hospital services to be privatised and use current federal funding to offer a universal health insurance. Australia has both the numbers and population densities to make this viable.
Not holding my breath here…
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Sep 10 09 7:59 am
Macdoctor – As long as I can remember this has been a problem at hospitals. For many years I worked rotating shifts in the Computer Industry as a Computer Operator. We did 12 hour shifts, had four Shift Teams and managed to do it all right. I realise that if five minutes before the end of your shift a bad case comes in you are obligated to carry on. That is where a half or one hour handover is done. Is this really so hard to fix or are hospital administrators and doctors just stupid – one for not fixing it and the other for accepting it as part of the job?
Sep 10 09 10:39 am
Hey Macdoctor
Sounds like the hours that Labtests technical staff have been working. I hear the union was in last Thursday!
Hope they don’t stuff up
Sep 10 09 1:26 pm
The mining industry in West Aussie has been given a bit of a shake up over their 14 on 7 off rosters. Fly in fly out means that when the guys are driving to their homes from Perth they may have 300 ks to do and have been awake for 18 hours. Apparently it is a huge health hazard.
So how come docs are expected to do the 80 hour thing?
NHS clones seems to be the Western worlds “flavour of the month”.
It is demonstrably expensive and inefficient every where it is in place, but Govts. the world over are keen to re invent the broken wheel.
Sep 10 09 2:07 pm
In my experience claims like these (working 80 hours without a break) do not stand scrutiny. They won’t have to worry soon – there is a flood of medical graduates from Queensland medical schools ready to inundate them in the next few years. Watch this space, they will be complaining about not being able to get training jobs soon. Doctors whine almost as much as Brits.
Sep 12 09 11:31 am
Thanks for that Macdoc, I’ve gone all watery eyed thinking about another time and another place.
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