A medical resident worked 207 hours of overtime in a month. His case highlights Japan’s continuing problem with karoshi - death by overwork.
A medical resident worked 207 hours of overtime in a month. His case highlights Japan’s continuing problem with karoshi - death by overwork.
207 hours/month = 51.75 hours overtime per week, or a 92.75 hour workweek. Until recently, US residents worked those hours, too (it’s now technically capped at 80 hours, but there are exceptions.)
Medical training is toxic.
80 hours.
What an absolute acid trip of a country.
Find a country where medical residency doesn’t work like this. It’s an archaic holdover from the 1800s era when student doctors were trained by apprenticeship
The Netherlands has pretty strict laws on how much you’re allowed to work, 12 hours max a day 60 hours max a week and you can deny working overtime.
But…. apprenticeships don’t have to be like that. Like there are apprenticeships for many other jobs, and they never are this abusive and awful.
I mean, yes. That’s why medical residencies need to be reformed. There’s zero reason they should be paid so little and made to work so many hours. None whatsoever.
And, in fact, I often make the argument that the current structure of medical residency actively harms patients because it filters out people with disabilities or even just normal smart people. Because the types of individuals who can tolerate and succeed in long, drawn-our, deeply abusive working environments are very, very, very different from the populations that they are then tasked with serving.
We wonder why physicians are so often out of touch with the struggles of their patients, and I think the structure of their training contributes a lot to that problem
Sounds like Hazing to me.
It’s absolutely hazing. So is a lot of nursing school, though much tamer. I point this out to my colleagues frequently.
My apprenticeship is 4 years long and I work 36 hours a week, then need to do the learning and academic work which is around an additional 35 hours a week.
I’m just rolling into year 4 and I’m pretty tired now.
I’m also the only one left, everyone else who started in my cohort has dropped out because of the workload.