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The patient hand-off problem is real. I just feel like there is a better solution than having these folks work 80+ hours a week.

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You can hire twice as many residents and make residency twice as long so they get the same total training at 40 hours a week.

You'll have to significantly increase resident salaries, and allow residents to move between hospitals to deal with life events. This isn't impossible, but it's politically infeasable while everyone is talking about cutting medical costs (total pay to residents would need to go up ~10-fold for this to work out). It's a bad situation today, but there isn't a simple magic wand to fix it with minor changes.

They won't have to train twice as long, because a great portion of those long days are wasted due to fatigue. All these reasons are excuses for sweatshop conditions that wouldn't be tolerated elsewhere.

Have you gone through residency training? While we both consider the conditions inhumane, my wife is absolutely clear on the fact that even at the end of a shift she's still learning a ton. Surgical residents commonly stay beyond their shifts to scrub in and assist or observe especially interesting cases. Based on my conversations with my wife and other residents, you would absolutely need to extend residency to get the same training with fewer hours.

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