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Summary
STUDY SCOPE AND OVERVIEW
The Institute of Medicine (IOM), at the request of Congress, and under
a contract with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ),
formed a consensus committee to “1) synthesize current evidence on medi-
cal resident schedules and healthcare safety, and 2) develop strategies to
enable optimization of work schedules to improve safety in the healthcare
work environment. The strategies recommended will take into account the
learning and experience that residents must achieve during their training.
The recommendations will be structured to optimize both the quality of
care and the educational objectives.” (See Appendix A.) AHRQ expressed
interest in total resident duty hours and how they were scheduled, and
included both in the selection of the committee name: Committee on Opti-
mizing Graduate Medical Trainee (Resident) Hours and Work Schedules to
Improve Patient Safety. Given the charge outlined in its statement of task,
the committee additionally focused on limited aspects of graduate medical
education and the resident work environment related to hours, schedules,
and patient safety.
The committee first reviewed graduate medical training in the United
States and the views of various stakeholders toward the current Accredita-
tion Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) duty hour limits
(Chapter 1), data on resident adherence to the limits and ACGME monitor-
ing practices (Chapter 2), and resident duty hour limits in other countries
(Appendix C). The committee then reviewed evidence on sleep, fatigue,
work, and performance, relative to errors and safety, and came to the fol-
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RESIDENT DUTY HOURS
lowing conclusion: There is considerable scientific evidence that 30 hours
of continuous time awake, as is permitted and common in current resident
work schedules, can result in fatigue. There is also extensive research that
shows that fatigue is an unsafe condition that contributes to reduced well-
being for residents and increased errors and accidents (Chapters 5, 6, and
7). A detailed examination of the scientific literature on fatigue and hours
of work identified prevention of sleep deprivation as a fundamental way to
optimize resident work schedules and prevent or minimize fatigue, while en-
suring the learning and experience that residents must achieve during their
training (Chapter 7). Studies find that fatigued residents can make more er-
rors and have more accidents, but there are simply too few data to reliably
estimate the extent to which errors in performance by fatigued residents
affect patients and cause them harm (Chapter 6). Evidence also suggests
additional ways to improve learning and safety in the healthcare work en-
vironment, through adjustment of resident workload, increased supervision
(Chapters 3 and 4), and other systems changes to enhance patient safety
(Chapter 8). Additional resources will be required to achieve the commit-
tee’s recommended adjustments to resident duty hours (Chapter 9).
Human beings deprived of sleep exhibit decreased cognitive perfor-
mance and alertness and increased likelihood of making errors. Although
some people are more vulnerable than others to sleep loss, everyone is
adversely affected by lack of adequate sleep. The committee evaluated the
current ACGME duty hours from the perspective of how well they prevent
acute and chronic sleep deprivation. It has concluded that greater attention
should be focused on increasing the opportunities for sleep during resident
training to prevent fatigue-related errors, rather than on simply reducing
total duty hours. The recommended fatigue prevention and mitigation ap-
proach preserves options to address individual training program needs to
have residents available for patient care at night and to allow for continu-
ity of patient care on admitting days through extended duty periods. The
evidence concerning resident safety and the risk of causing errors when
fatigued argues for strong and prompt action.
The committee has also concluded that solely regulating resident duty
hours and increasing adherence to them would be insufficient to improve
conditions for resident and patient safety. The committee firmly believes
that a number of additional interrelated changes are needed: more direct
supervision of junior residents, adjustment of residents’ workload, provid-
ing sufficient time for residents to reflect on their clinical experiences, and
improved patient transfers. These necessary accompaniments to duty hour
reform are worth implementing even under existing duty hour limits. A
stronger culture of safety in hospitals and enhanced teamwork in patient
care can also contribute to safety. The committee noted that 8 years after
the publication of the 2000 IOM report To Err Is Human (IOM, 2000),
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SUMMARY
patient safety in hospitals remains a very serious problem that goes well
beyond the subset of hospitals that train residents. Adequate and reliable
national data necessary to identify the scope of the problem and track
progress are not available.
BACKGROUND
The principal aim of residency training in the United States is to pre-
pare young doctors for the safe, independent practice of medicine once they
are on their own. An important part of graduate medical training is that
it exposes residents to the demands of real-life practice, including the long
work hours of physicians (50 to 60 hours a week on average, with a certain
percentage working more than 80 hours a week). In 2003 the ACGME
adopted a set of duty hour regulations limiting resident workweeks to an
average of 80 hours over 4 weeks, among other limits (ACGME, 2003).
The 80-hour average was established as a maximum workweek, not a
required workweek. Many medical educators believe that these extensive
duty hours during training are essential to provide residents with the rich
educational experience necessary to achieve professional competence in the
complexities of diagnosis and treatment of patients.
Residents play a significant role in the health system. They are fre-
quently the frontline physician-level staff on duty 24/7 in teaching hospitals.
Residency continues to consist largely of an apprenticeship approach to
learning through service to hospital inpatients and outpatients under the
guidance of their attending physician. It is during rotations on inpatient
services that residents are more likely to have 80-hour workweeks.
The academic health centers in which most residents train are known
for their cutting-edge, quality care for many conditions. During training,
residents care for a large number of patients. All current and potential
consumers of health care benefit from their services as well as from the
graduate medical system that trains future physicians. Doctors in train-
ing, while paid an annual salary, cost the institution less than other fully
trained clinicians (e.g., nurse practitioners, physician assistants, attending
physicians) who could perform some or all of residents’ services, when
their salary is calculated on an hourly basis because they work such long
hours.
As the committee examined alternative resident duty hours and sched-
ules, it was aware of the tension between the educational objectives of
medical residency and the economic incentives of training institutions.
Both society at large and the training institutions benefit from residents’
service at relatively low cost. An institution’s decision about when to as-
sign residents to perform service tasks and when to use other healthcare
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RESIDENT DUTY HOURS
professionals depends on both the costs and the availability of a workforce
with appropriate skills.
THE HISTORY OF RESIDENT DUTY HOUR REGULATION
The work of the committee follows previous modifications in residents’
duty hours. Before 2003, the on-duty hours of first- and second-year resi-
dents frequently exceeded a mean of 80 hours per week (e.g., neurosurgery
residents reported averaging 110 hours per week) (Baldwin et al., 2003).
The genesis of widespread public concern about resident duty hours
was the death of 18-year-old Libby Zion in the emergency room of a New
York City hospital in 1984. Her family charged that her death was due
to inadequate care provided by overworked and undersupervised medical
residents. A grand jury did not charge any of the residents but concluded
that the long duty hours of residents are counterproductive to both patient
care and resident learning. The Bell Commission was formed to review
these issues and recommended that resident duty hours in New York be
limited and supervision increased (Bell, 2003). Since then the focus of atten-
tion has been on regulating duty hours, yet the Bell Commission’s greatest
concern was actually with the supervision of residents by more experienced
physicians.
After the Bell Commission, resident unions, some residents’ organiza-
tions, and public interest groups advocated for national duty hour limits
common to all specialties. Public Citizen petitioned the U.S. Occupational
Safety and Health Administration to regulate resident hours as a worker
safety issue, and Congress introduced legislation that would have the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services regulate resident hours and
impose fines for institutional violations. These legislative proposals would
have provided incremental funding to help institutions adjust to the limits.
These proposals were not adopted. In 2003 the ACGME promulgated
nationwide requirements common to all specialties limiting the workweek
to an 80-hour average. Although for a sound educational rationale some
programs can obtain an exemption for up to 88 hours per week, relatively
few programs (primarily neurosurgery programs) have received this exemp-
tion (ACGME, 2003).
IMPLEMENTATION OF 2003 DUTY HOUR RULES
Residency programs changed in a variety of ways to accommodate the
2003 ACGME rules. Some residency programs redesigned their schedules
or shifted tasks from interns to more senior residents or faculty; others
hired substitutes for some of the residents’ workload (e.g., support staff,
nurse practitioners, physician assistants, hospitalists, moonlighting residents
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SUMMARY
and fellows). Still others reconfigured their programs to eliminate nighttime
coverage by residents, restricted which services would be part of resident
training programs (e.g., retreating from some affiliations), or even con-
sidered no longer having training programs. The committee has reviewed
reports and heard testimony on particular programs’ adaptations, but no
one has conducted a national data-driven assessment across specialties of
how adoption of the 2003 ACGME duty hour requirements has changed
residency programs.
In assessing the influence of the 2003 duty hour limits to date, the fol-
lowing are five key questions:
1. Have resident duty hours actually been reduced? Yes, it appears so
from a single national study and from individual program reports.
The best available national data across multiple specialties from the
first year of implementation (2003-2004) show that the workweek
of interns, who typically had the longest duty hours, was reduced
from an average of 70.7 to 66.6 hours per week. However, 43 per-
cent of interns reported having violated the 80-hour rule when aver-
aged over 4 weeks (Landrigan et al., 2006). No more recent, reliable,
national data are available to determine average hours worked by
training year or specialty or the reasons for violations when they
occur. Reports from individual programs, ACGME surveys and ac-
creditation visits, and annual reviews of compliance in the State of
New York also indicate that violations persist, particularly of the
30-hour extended duty rule and the required opportunities for rest
and recovery from fatigue. Reasons given by residents for violating
the duty hour limits include workload pressures, individual patient
circumstances, or the desire of residents to stay in order to partici-
pate in the continuing care of their patients.
2. Have patient outcomes improved? A few large-scale nationwide
studies show slight improvements in mortality for some medical,
but not surgical, patients in teaching-intensive hospitals and no
worsening of mortality in teaching hospitals after the introduction
of the 2003 limits (Shetty and Bhattacharya, 2007; Volpp et al.,
2007a,b). One cannot attribute these improvements to duty hour
reduction per se because numerous quality improvement initia-
tives were introduced in teaching hospitals over the same period;
however, these studies show no evidence of harm as measured by
mortality rates. Individual site-specific and specialty-specific studies
focus on their success in restructuring programs to maintain previ-
ous levels of patient outcomes; these studies tend to be too small to
detect statistically significant changes in mortality or do not control
for external trends in quality improvement.
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0 RESIDENT DUTY HOURS
3. Is resident fatigue from long duty hours among the most signifi-
cant risks to patient safety? Residents report that fatigue decreases
the quality of care they deliver and contributes to error, as does
high workload. Patient safety is affected by many factors, and the
research data available did not make it possible for the commit-
tee to assess the current level of all risks to patients or the degree
to which fatigued residents contribute to patient harm. Only one
randomized controlled trial compared shifts of up to 16 hours
and scheduled work of 60-63 hours per week to a schedule with
extended duty periods up to 30 hours and scheduled work weeks
averaging 77-81 hours. This study reported no statistically signifi-
cant difference in patient safety as measured by preventable adverse
events (Landrigan et al., 2004). However, in the more traditional
schedule with longer duty hours, residents made more serious
medical errors (Landrigan et al., 2004) and had a higher rate of
attentional failure (Lockley et al., 2004). The committee believes
there is enough evidence from studies of residents and additional
scientific literature on human performance and the need for sleep
to recommend changes to resident training and duty hours aimed
at promoting safer working conditions for residents and patients
by reducing resident fatigue.
4. Have educational outcomes been affected? Residency training
takes 3 to 7 years, depending on the specialty being pursued; the
first cohort of 3-year residents trained entirely under 2003 ACGME
limits finished in June 2006. Data on board certification pass rates
for this cohort are just beginning to emerge. Thus, it is impossible
at this time to determine if there has been a consistent trend across
specialties.
5. Has resident quality of life improved? In general, the perception
of residents and faculty, as reported in the literature and testimony
before the committee, is that resident quality of life and work-life
balance have improved with the advent of the 2003 duty hour
limits. Eighty hours a week is still a demanding schedule, and a
number of single-institution and specialty-specific studies show
that residents report high rates of stress, depression, and burnout.
However, studies also suggest that factors beyond duty hours, such
as work intensity, contribute to the resident’s emotional state.
THE NExT ERA OF REFORM FOR BETTER
EDUCATION AND PATIENT SAFETY
ACGME and its constituent stakeholders adopted the 80-hour work-
week in 2003 as a national standard for all graduate medical training in the
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SUMMARY
United States. Countries under the European Work Time Directive currently
have fewer weekly hours for their training programs; the European goal is
48 hours per week by 2009. Elsewhere, New Zealand has a 72-hour limit,
and Manitoba, Canada, an 89-hour limit. Foreign nations have had trouble
implementing their significantly reduced duty hour targets, and some of
their efforts appear to have had unintended consequences, such as exacer-
bating workforce shortages and reducing the amount of time for residents
to learn and for surgeons to gain operative experience (see Appendix C).
The committee concludes from these international experiences that no
single model from another country is directly and completely applicable to
the U.S. system of care.
The past 5 years since the ACGME duty hour rules were implemented
have been a period of change and adjustment for training programs in the
United States. Many programs have replaced scheduling and staffing models
adopted in the initial year, and they continue to refine them in their efforts
to improve educational value, quality of patient care, and service coverage.
Research studies tend to report institution-specific adaptations, and there
are few national data or rigorous analyses of different scheduling models
across institutions or specialties. However, based on the collective field
experiences of programs, the committee concluded that some degree of
flexibility in duty hour scheduling would have to be retained.
COMMITTEE FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The evidence and rationale behind each recommendation can be found
in the chapter cited prior to the recommendation.
Preamble to Recommendations
To promote conditions for safe medical care, improve the education
of doctors in training, and increase the safety of residents and the general
public, the committee offers the following recommendations, which should
be implemented with all deliberate speed. While some recommendations
should be implemented immediately, changes to duty hours, adjustments
in workload, and the funding needed for these changes might require
an integrated phase-in. The recommendations will require additional re-
sources—both financial and human. Without the necessary restructuring
in resource allocation, attempts to implement the recommendations will
fail to have the desired benefits and could even reduce patient safety. The
committee believes that the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical
Education and the other organizations charged to implement aspects of the
recommendations should begin their work with urgency, and that action on
all recommendations should be taken within 24 months.
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RESIDENT DUTY HOURS
Preventing and Mitigating Fatigue
A robust evidence base linking fatigue with decreased performance in
both research laboratory and clinical settings has convinced the committee
to focus on how to prevent fatigue when possible and how to mitigate fa-
tigue when residents must be on duty by allowing for sleep during extended
duty periods and adequate time for recovery sleep while off duty. Reducing
total duty hours from an 80-hour average is one way that might be expected
to allow more sleep, but evidence suggests it is an indirect and inefficient
approach given the moderate correlation that exists between resident duty
hours and sleep time. Prolonged wakefulness in excess of 16 hours at work,
reduced or disturbed periods of sleep, more consecutive days or nights of
work, shift variability, and the volume of work all increase fatigue and thus
can contribute to errors. Meeting daily and weekly sleep needs helps pre-
vent fatigue and diminished performance and contributes to an enhanced
ability to learn and remember.
Residency programs should increase the opportunity for sleep each day,
utilize strategic naps and longer sleep periods at work, increase the number
and frequency of days free from work for “catch-up sleep” and recovery,
and minimize cumulative sleep loss in a week based on rest and recovery
factors. Published research from the sleep literature supports the specific
actions contained in the committee’s adjustments to duty hours, including
limiting the amount of time a resident is continuously working each day to
no more than 16 hours unless a 5-hour protected period for sleep is pro-
vided. This in-house sleep period during extended duty of 30 hours should
count against total duty hours as sleep during night shifts or overnight call
periods does now. Table S-1 compares the elements in the committee’s rec-
ommendations to current ACGME rules. (See also Chapter 7.)
The recommendations permit flexibility in several ways under the new
duty hour parameters set out below. Although the scientific evidence base
establishes that human performance begins to deteriorate after 16 hours
of wakefulness, the committee does not believe that limiting all shifts to
a maximum of 16 hours would address the educational needs of all spe-
cialties. So extended duty periods of up to 30 hours (the current limit)
are allowed with the inclusion of a sleep period to address acute sleep
deprivation. Additionally, there is the possibility of nonroutine exemptions
from individual limits for the safety of unstable patients and exceptional
learning experiences with the expectation that residents will be closely
supervised when these learning experiences extend beyond hour limits,
and ACGME already sponsors research projects to test innovations for
scheduling alternatives. Further, the committee has retained the maximum
of an 80-hour-a-week average, rather than reduce it, to continue to allow
each specialty and program site to have what they determine are sufficient
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SUMMARY
TABLE S-1 Comparison of IOM Committee Adjustments to Current
ACGME Duty Hour Limits
2003 ACGME Duty
Hour Limits IOM Recommendation
Maximum hours of work 80 hours, averaged over 4 No change
per week weeks
Maximum shift length 30 hours (admitting • 30 hours (admitting patients
patients up to 24 hours for up to 16 hours, plus
then 6 additional hours 5-hour protected sleep
for transitional and period between 10 p.m. and
educational activities) 8 a.m. with the remaining
hours for transition and
educational activities)
• 16 hours with no protected
sleep period
Maximum in-hospital on- Every third night, on Every third night, no
call frequency average averaging
Minimum time off between 10 hours after shift length • 10 hours after day shift
scheduled shifts • 12 hours after night shift
• 14 hours after any extended
duty period of 30 hours and
not return until 6 a.m. of
next day
Maximum frequency of Not addressed 4 night maximum; 48 hours
in-hospital night shifts off after 3 or 4 nights of
consecutive duty
Mandatory time off duty • 4 days off per month • 5 days off per month
• 1 day (24 hours) off per • 1 day (24 hours) off per
week, averaged over 4 week, no averaging
weeks • One 48-hour period off per
month
• nternal and external
Moonlighting Internal moonlighting is I
counted against 80-hour moonlighting is counted
weekly limit against 80-hour weekly limit
• ll other duty hour limits
A
apply to moonlighting in
combination with scheduled
work
Limit on hours for 88 hours for select No change
exceptions programs with a sound
educational rationale
Emergency room limits 12-hour shift limit, at least No change
an equivalent period of
time off between shifts;
60-hour workweek with
additional 12 hours for
education
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4 RESIDENT DUTY HOURS
hours to achieve their learning goals. The committee does not believe
that all specialties and rotations will require this lengthy workweek. Any
Residency Review Committee that sets educational standards for its spe-
cialty in conjunction with ACGME may choose to create more restrictive
duty hour limits if it considers changes to be necessary for its particular
circumstances (e.g., severity of patient cases, constancy of high-intensity
work). For example, this has been done in emergency medicine, which
limits shift length to 12 hours, totaling 60 hours per week, plus 12 hours
for education; the committee does not recommend any change in the hours
for emergency medicine. (See Chapter 7.)
Residency programs will have to continue to redesign schedules and
handover practices to promote patient safety. They may need to use night
floats or other backup mechanisms, such as onsite attending-level supervi-
sion, when residents are required to have a scheduled sleep period. The
committee understands the challenges of changing individual and institu-
tional behaviors and the importance of changing professional attitudes to
promote personal responsibility for one’s own safety and that of others
by obtaining necessary sleep. With implementation of the new duty hour
adjustments, monitoring is necessary to identify and address unintended
scheduling consequences that provide fewer educational experiences for
residents (e.g., excessive nighttime work, expanded cross-coverage). (See
Chapter 7.)
Recommendation: ACGME should adopt and enforce requirements for
residency training that adhere to the following principles: duty hour
limits and schedules should promote the prevention of sleep loss and
fatigue; additional measures should mitigate fatigue when it is unavoid-
able (e.g., during night work and extended duty periods); and schedules
should provide for predictable, protected, and sufficient uninterrupted
recovery sleep to relieve acute and chronic sleep loss, promote resident
well-being, and balance learning requirements. Programs should design
resident schedules using the following parameters:
• Duty hours must not exceed 80 per week, averaged over 4
weeks.
• Scheduled continuous duty periods must not exceed 16 hours
unless a 5-hour uninterrupted continuous sleep period is pro-
vided between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. This period must be free from
all work and call, and used by the resident for sleep in a safe
and sleep-conducive environment. The 5-hour period for sleep
must count toward total weekly duty hour limits. Following the
protected sleep period, a resident may continue the extended
duty period up to a total of 30 hours, including any previous
work time and the sleep period.
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SUMMARY
• Residents should not admit new patients after 16 hours during
an extended duty period.
• Extended duty periods (e.g., 30 hours that include a protected
5-hour sleep period) must not be more frequent than every third
night with no averaging.
• After completing duty periods, residents must be allowed a con-
tinuous off-duty interval of
o A minimum of 10 hours following a daytime duty period that
is not part of an extended duty period,
o A minimum of 12 hours following a night float or night shift
work that is not part of an extended duty period, and
o A minimum of 14 hours following an extended duty period,
and residents should not return to service earlier than 6 a.m.
the next day.
• Night-float or night-shift duty must not exceed four consecutive
nights and must be followed by a minimum of 48 continuous
hours off duty after three or four consecutive nights.
• At least one 24-hour off-duty period must be provided per 7-day
period without averaging; one additional (consecutive) 24-hour
period off duty must be provided to ensure at least one continu-
ous 48-hour period off duty per month.
• In exceptional circumstances requiring the resident’s physical
presence to ensure patient safety or to engage in a critical learn-
ing opportunity, program faculty may permit, but not require,
residents to remain on duty beyond the scheduled time; programs
must record for ACGME review the nature of each exception
allowed. These exceptions are not to become routine practice.
Residency Review Committees should determine at the time of
program re-accreditation whether the documented exceptions to
scheduled duty hours warrant citation.
• The ACGME should develop criteria for granting individual
programs waivers from one or more of the above scheduling
parameters; such criteria should be formulated only to accom-
modate rare, well-documented circumstances in which patient
safety and/or educational requirements of specific programs
outweigh the advantages of full compliance with the commit-
tee’s recommendations and cannot be addressed by means other
than the requested waiver(s); programs that are granted waiv-
ers (if any) and the nature of those waivers should be posted
on the public access portion of the ACGME website. Included
in the application for waiver should be a long-term plan that
articulates how the program will work to avoid a permanent
need for the requested waiver. All waivers should be monitored
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RESIDENT DUTY HOURS
and reviewed on an annual basis to determine suitability for
renewal.
• Programs should provide annual formal education for residents
and staff on the adverse effects of sleep loss and fatigue and
on the importance of and means for their prevention and
mitigation.
• Sponsoring institutions and programs should ensure that their
practices promote and ensure that residents take the required
sleep during extended duty periods.
Given the committee’s intent to reduce fatigue and improve learning
during residency, it believes that moonlighting by residents, which can
interfere with already limited opportunities for sleep, must be addressed.
Moonlighting outside of residency training would cut into the strategically
designed periods for rest and sleep and could reduce residents’ readiness
for their primary duties. Limits on resident duty hours designed to protect
patients and residents should extend to any additional paid healthcare
work that residents undertake. This requirement, built into the residency
contract, would emphasize that residents ultimately have a responsibility to
exhibit professional commitment and to avoid additional obligations that
increase their fatigue level and interfere with their capacity to learn and to
provide safe patient care. (See Chapter 7.)
Recommendation: The ACGME should immediately amend its current
requirements on moonlighting by
• Requiring that any internal and external moonlighting for pa-
tient care adhere to the duty hour limits listed above (e.g., 80
hours and all other limits), even if the program has received an
exception to schedule longer hours; and
• Requiring that sponsoring institutions, if they choose to permit
moonlighting, include provisions in resident contracts that (1)
a resident must request prospective, written permission from
the program director for moonlighting; and (2) resident perfor-
mance will be monitored to ensure that there is no adverse effect
of moonlighting on resident performance.
Improving Adherence to Current Duty Hours
ACGME is currently responsible for assessing adherence to duty hours
rules along with the educational aspects of graduate medical training as
part of its announced onsite accreditation review and via surveys of resi-
dents. In 2006-2007, ACGME reported that 8.8 percent of programs were
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SUMMARY
substantially noncompliant with some aspect of duty hour limits. This is
likely an underestimation of noncompliance—probably due to the current
disincentive for residents to report violations because it puts their training
program at risk of disaccreditation. The committee concludes that ACGME
monitoring of duty hours needs to be strengthened by adding unannounced
visits and increasing their frequency to deter violations. Additionally, the
incentives need to be realigned, perhaps through fines for continued viola-
tions and improved protections for residents who report pressure to violate
limits.
The committee sees benefits in continuing ACGME monitoring because
of the value of maintaining the integration of duty hours with educational
program monitoring and the need to expedite a stronger process. Rather
than establish a new entity, ACGME could move more quickly to enhance
its enforcement and whistle-blower processes, since it already has several
years of experience and has the infrastructure in place. The committee
noted that the experiences of other countries and other industries with
government regulation does not ensure full adherence to duty hour limits.
To further address concerns raised to the committee about ACGME as the
sole duty hour monitoring agency and to tie duty hours to patient safety
reviews, it considered the pros and cons of involving other organizations in
monitoring responsibilities. The committee recommends a complementary
oversight role for both the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
(CMS) and the Joint Commission. CMS could conduct or contract for pe-
riodic evaluations of adherence to resident duty hours, the effectiveness of
ACGME monitoring practices, and the acceptability of program rationales
for exceptions to duty hour limits. Similarly, the Joint Commission could
integrate duty hour oversight by monitoring the contribution of fatigue to
patient safety events in the tracer cases that it reviews during hospital ac-
creditation site visits. (See Chapter 2.)
Recommendation: ACGME and residency programs should ensure
adherence to the current limits now, and to any new limits when imple-
mented, by strengthening their current monitoring practices. To provide
additional support, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
and the Joint Commission should take an active oversight role:
• ACGME should maintain responsibility for duty hour moni-
toring and should enhance its procedures by including unan-
nounced visits for monitoring duty hours and regular collec-
tion of sufficient data to understand when and why limits are
violated.
• Sponsoring institutions should provide for confidential, protected
reporting of duty hour violations by residents through their com-
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RESIDENT DUTY HOURS
pliance office or by an entity above the program level that does
not have direct responsibility over the residency programs.
• ACGME should strengthen its complaint procedures to provide
more confidentiality and protection to persons reporting violations
of duty hours, as well as other violations of residency rules.
• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should as-
sess the reliability of ACGME procedures and data and should
sponsor periodic independent reviews of ACGME’s duty hour
monitoring to determine the characteristics of and reasons for
violations.
• The Joint Commission should seek to ensure that duty hour
monitoring is linked to broader activities to improve patient
safety in hospitals, including the use of ACGME’s adherence data
as part of the Joint Commission’s hospital surveys and accredita-
tion actions.
Improving the Safety of Residents and the Public
The degree of fatigue experienced by residents places them at risk for
workplace and driving injuries. At work, physical injuries commonly oc-
cur while caring for patients, such as accidental needlesticks or exposure
to blood-borne pathogens. Driving home after an extended duty period
or a night shift can be hazardous to both residents and the public because
residents are more likely to be involved in a crash at those times. The com-
mittee recognizes that steps to reduce fatigue such as the 5-hour protected
sleep period may not be put in place immediately, making it particularly
important to provide safe transportation options now to and from work
for residents working extended duty periods. Education should also be
provided for residents to understand the risks they pose to themselves and
others if they choose to drive. The committee recognizes that there may
be alternative solutions (e.g., providing space to allow residents to sleep
before driving home after long shifts), but there should be monitoring and
evaluation to ensure usage of alternatives and reduction in opportunities
for unsafe driving. (See Chapter 5.)
Recommendation: The committee recommends that sponsoring insti-
tutions immediately begin to provide safe transportation options (e.g.,
taxi or public transportation vouchers) for any resident who for any
reason is too fatigued to drive home safely.
Optimizing Resident Education for Resident Learning and Patient Safety
One of the unintended consequences of the 2003 duty hour limits has
been work compression (i.e., residents have to care for the same number of
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SUMMARY
patients in less time), which is basically an increased workload. Economic
pressures continue to tilt the balance between learning and service in many
residency programs too far toward service delivery and away from educa-
tion. To improve the quality of care delivered to current and future patients
and to meet long-term educational objectives, the committee recommends
improvements in the content of residents’ work, a patient workload and
intensity appropriate to learning, and more frequent consultations between
residents and their supervisors. The committee believes that better-educated
residents will contribute to increased safety for future patients. Educational
research demonstrates that a manageable workload contributes to effective
learning because of human limits on cognitive capacity, the necessity for
well-timed periods of reflection, and the need for sleep in order to consoli-
date learning.
There are more than 26 types of residency specialties (e.g., surgery, pe-
diatrics, anesthesiology, emergency medicine), and each has a different mix
of patient characteristics, flow of work, and types of interventions. Resi-
dency Review Committees (RRCs) are in a better position than this com-
mittee to determine proficiency requirements for the individual specialties
and to set appropriate caseload limits that support learning for each year of
residency. The committee notes that the ACGME’s internal medicine RRC
is the only discipline thus far to set caseload caps for its residents. Other
RRCs should gather and analyze the data needed to establish guidelines
for caseload, as a start toward making the number of patients that resi-
dents care for more transparent and reducing unjustified variability within
a specialty across the country while permitting necessary adjustments for
individual program circumstances.
Reducing resident duty hours and workload within those hours should
not mean that residency training must be lengthened, although some dis-
ciplines may choose to do so. Having better ways to identify and assess
mastery of a specialty (e.g., use of simulators) and maximizing the learning
content of each resident’s clinical experiences, rather than relying on “time
in service” as a proxy for determining true competence, would be a major
advance in medical education. Also, the committee emphasizes that the re-
duction of work with little or no educational value (e.g., making follow-up
appointments) opens time for education, caring for additional patients, and
compliance with duty hours. (See Chapter 3.)
Recommendation: To ensure that residency programs fulfill their core
educational mission, ACGME should require that institutions sponsor-
ing residency programs appropriately adjust resident workload by
• Providing support services and redesigning healthcare delivery
systems to minimize the current level of residents’ work that is of
limited or no educational value, is extraneous to their graduate
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0 RESIDENT DUTY HOURS
medical education program’s educational goals and objectives,
and can be done well by others; and
• Providing residents with adequate time to conduct thorough
evaluations of patients and for reflective learning based on their
clinical experiences.
ACGME should require each Residency Review Committee to define
and then require appropriate limits on the caseload (e.g., patient cen-
sus, number of admissions, number of surgical cases to assist per day,
cross-coverage) that can be assigned to a resident at a given time, taking
into consideration the severity and complexity of patient illness and the
level of residents’ competency.
In the Libby Zion case, the grand jury said, “A hospital is . . . a place
where the learning process should continue under strict supervision. Thus,
medical decisions, whether in an emergency room or on a hospital floor
should not be made by inexperienced interns and junior residents without
in-person consultations with more senior physicians . . .” (Bell, 2003). Bet-
ter supervision not only provides educational benefits, but also increases the
likelihood of intercepting potential errors, better patient outcomes, less test
ordering, more resident comfort with performing procedures, fewer delays
in diagnosis and test ordering, more widespread use of care guidelines, and
potentially lower costs.
Although reimbursement policies require residents to consult with their
supervising attending physicians on their assessment of a patient and the
proposed treatment plan, residents too often lack adequate communication
with them except in the operating room where they are more likely to be
directly supervised. Protocols should be developed and implemented to have
the supervisor reach out and periodically check with the resident on duty,
thus increasing the willingness of residents, especially first-year residents,
to contact their supervisors. (See Chapter 4.)
Recommendation: To increase patient safety and enhance education for
residents, the ACGME should ensure that programs provide adequate,
direct, onsite supervision for residents. The ACGME should require
• The Residency Review Committees, in conjunction with teach-
ing institutions and program directors, to establish measurable
standards of supervision for each level of doctor in training, as
appropriate to their specialty; and
• First-year residents not to be on duty without having immediate
access to a residency program-approved supervisory physician
in-house.
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SUMMARY
Deploying Learning Systems for Handovers and Error Detection,
Correction, and Reporting
A handover is the transfer of patients’ information and responsibil-
ity for their care from one healthcare provider or team of caregivers to
another. Handovers are considered critical moments in the continuity of
patient care and have been identified as a significant source of hospital
errors, often related to poor communication. Learning how to conduct
better handovers and intercept errors before they reach patients would
enhance the performance of all staff, not only residents. Yet because
handover frequency increased with the reduction of duty hours in 2003
(and likely with protected sleep periods as well), the committee con-
cludes that it will be vital for residents to learn how to perform them
most effectively. Residents will need to be trained in practicing struc-
tured handover procedures, with their attending physicians helping them
learn to anticipate the key information that needs to be passed from one
shift to another. It will be important to schedule shift changes so that
there is an adequate overlap of time to conduct effective handovers. (See
Chapter 8.)
Recommendation: Teaching hospitals should design, implement, and
institutionalize structured handover processes to ensure continuity of
care and patient safety.
• Programs should train residents and teams in how to hand over
their patients using effective communications.
• Programs should schedule an overlap in time when teams transi-
tion on and off duty to allow for handovers.
• The process should include a system that quickly provides staff
and patients with the name of the resident currently responsible
in addition to the name of the attending physician.
Residents also need to be taught error detection, correction, report-
ing, and monitoring in order to participate fully in the hospital’s quality
improvement efforts. Although residents admit to making errors, the
reason for the error is often not traceable to individual negligence, fatigue,
or lack of knowledge, but rather to shortcomings in the system in which
the resident works (e.g., unsafe medication labeling, excessive work-
load leading to rushing). Residents (and others) are also reluctant to report
errors if the environment is punitive. Residency programs could become
leaders by helping their institution develop a culture of safety and inte-
grating residents into its quality improvement efforts. (See Chapter 8.)
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RESIDENT DUTY HOURS
Recommendation: Graduate medical education-sponsoring institutions
should fully involve residents in their safety reporting, learning, and
quality improvement systems, and this should become an important
part of the residents’ educational experience.
Obtaining Additional Resources for Implementation
Sponsoring institutions incurred substantial costs when adapting to
the 2003 ACGME duty hour rules; some major teaching hospitals report
an additional $1 million to $7 million each in annual costs. No specific
national funds were allocated for implementation, but many hospitals were
able to offset the costs through enhanced revenues or reduced expenditures
elsewhere. To meet the committee’s recommended duty hour changes, ad-
ditional financial and human resources would have to be obtained and
existing ones applied differently. Some resident work could be transferred
to other clinicians and support staff, but programs in some areas might be
constrained by shortages of nurses, physician assistants, and nurse prac-
titioners or by lack of funds to hire additional personnel. The committee
estimated that annual national costs of personnel to substitute for the re-
duced resident work could be approximately $1.7 billion, according to an
economic model of selected scenarios. This range represents approximately
0.4 percent of the Medicare budget (CBO, 2008). While some institutions
would be able to find some or all of the necessary financial and human re-
sources, other institutions would need outside assistance to help implement
the recommendations.
To avoid having residents bear the burden of implementing the duty
hour recommendations by increasing their workload again, and increasing
the risk to patient safety, additional funds for graduate medical education
(GME) are needed from all existing as well as new sources. The commit-
tee strongly urges Congress and all potential GME funding sources to
consider various mechanisms to support the recommended changes. For
example, some possible considerations include increasing the pool of feder-
ally supported residency positions (perhaps through changes to the current
Medicare cap on positions), enhancing Medicare’s direct medical education
payments, and greater support for residency training through private insur-
ers. (See Chapter 9.)
Recommendation: All financial stakeholders in graduate medical educa-
tion, such as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Depart-
ment of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense, Health Resources
and Services Administration, states and local governments, private
insurers, and sponsoring institutions, should financially support the
changes necessitated by the committee’s recommendations to promote
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SUMMARY
patient safety and resident safety and education, with special attention
to safety net hospitals.
• An independent convening body should bring together all the
major funders of graduate medical education to examine current
financing methodologies and develop a coordinated approach to
generate needed resources.
Closing the Gap in Knowledge
Gaps in the available evidence base hampered the committee’s work.
Given concerns that the medical community has expressed about the 2003
changes in duty hours, the committee was disappointed with the lack of
any comprehensive attempt to document changes in residency programs
and their impact, if any, on educational outcomes and patient safety. The
committee believes that its recommendations can be implemented now
without years of additional research because the adjustments for duty hours
are rooted in a solid evidence base. Going forward, there should be a plan
to evaluate key indicators and a process to document future changes by
specialty. Monitoring is important for early detection of any unintended
consequences that might indicate a need to fine tune the recommendations
over time. Prospective studies that have attempted to evaluate the effects of
duty hours on patient safety generally have had sample sizes that lacked suf-
ficient power to determine whether significant changes in errors (especially
preventable adverse events), mortality, or other measures of patient harm
occurred. Prospective studies of the implementation of the committee’s rec-
ommendations should be planned, conducted, and funded; consideration of
any future adjustments to duty hours would then have a more comprehen-
sive database as a foundation for recommendations. (See Chapter 9.)
Recommendation: To gather the data necessary to monitor implemen-
tation of these recommendations and to prepare for future adjustments
as needed to achieve the desired objectives, ACGME should convene
a meeting of stakeholders and potential funders to set priorities for re-
search and evaluation projects. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, National Insti-
tutes of Health, Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Af-
fairs, and other funders should support this work as a high priority.
CONCLUSION
Educating resident physicians is an exceedingly important function of
the health system; it is essential for ensuring safe, high-quality health care to
patients in the future. A fundamental requirement of resident education is
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4 RESIDENT DUTY HOURS
in-depth, firsthand experience caring for actual patients. Ensuring the safety
and well-being of patients who participate in the education of residents is
of the utmost importance. During acquisition of the competencies required
for independent practice, residents are going to make errors but they should
not result in harm to patients. One must look beyond hours of work alone
as a risk factor during training and put in place practices (e.g., time for
sufficient sleep, enhanced supervision, appropriate workload, unambiguous
handovers) that will minimize other contributors to error (fatigue, insuf-
ficient knowledge to arrive at a diagnosis, excessive workload that leads to
rushing, failure to communicate key clinical data). Fortunately, these fac-
tors can be addressed, and in doing so, the patient care environment can
be made safer. The committee recognizes that full implementation of all its
recommendations will take some time to be phased in.
The aim in adjusting duty hours and recommending other improve-
ments is to develop training institutions that provide the best health care
in safe environments for patients and the optimal learning environment
for residents. The issues surrounding residency education and duty hours
should be revisited in a few years to assess the changes put in place and
their impact. The committee hopes that by spurring more rigorous moni-
toring and evaluation there will be further identification of best practices
that result in improved patient and resident safety. Duty hour requirements
should evolve to incorporate new scientific evidence as well as changing
circumstances in the U.S. healthcare system.
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