Federal mandates last year capped the resident’s work week at 80 hours, reducing the amount of time spent in the operating room and in the hospital treating patients.
To insure that residents still gain the necessary skills, medical educators have had to adapt teaching methods and are increasingly turning to virtual training techniques and laboratories.
A lingering concern, however, is that even with the reduced workload, residency training is demanding, leading busy residents to forfeit sleep. To find out whether sleep deficits would affect the acquisition of surgical skills in the lab, Temple University researchers evaluated learning in residents who had had varying amounts of sleep the previous evening. Their findings were recently published in Surgical Endoscopy.
“We tested the efficacy of our laboratory model for teaching the technically challenging surgical skills of minimally invasive surgery,” said Harsh Grewal, M.D., associate professor of surgery at Temple University School of Medicine and a pediatric surgeon at Temple University Children’s Medical Center. “We found that the amount of sleep the night before had no significant effect on their learning or performance.”
Because medical errors can be associated with fatigue and sleep deprivation, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education mandated changes last year in the education of surgical and medical residents. In addition to the 80-hour work week cap, continuous on-call duty is now limited to a 24-hour maximum.