Yes, a tired doctor sucks. But a tired doctor who already has the patient's state loaded into their head may still be better than doctor who is completely fresh in both senses.
It's a hard problem.
I’m sure cases exist. But I’d be rather surprised if they’re common.
This would not appear to apply to emergency surgeries. They aren't done by doctors who are familiar with the patient anyway. (Neither are non-emergency surgeries. Surgeries are done by doctors who do that kind of surgery. Familiarity with the patient is useful in deciding what surgery should be done, but not in doing the surgery.)
(not defending, I also think its insane, just devils advocate)
12:00am - 6:00am: Doctor 1 and Doctor 4 are doing everything together.
6:00am - 12:00pm: Doctor 1 and Doctor 2 are doing everything together.
12:00pm - 6:00pm: Doctor 2 and Doctor 3 are doing everything together.
6:00pm - 12:00am: Doctor 3 and Doctor 4 are doing everything together.
This way, all 4 doctors only do 12 hour shifts, and the patient's state is maintained continuously through all 24 hours.
1. Shortly after, a doctor A came in, asked some questions, looked at the chart, and told us she was having the baby tonight. Holy shit our life is about to get crazy and we're going to be parents 2+ months early! He leaves.
2. Several hours later doctor B comes in. We ask about delivery. "Oh, no. You're not going to have the baby now. But you will have to be on bed rest until the due date." Jesus, my wife is going to have to quit her job.
4. Even more hours later, now the next morning, doctor C arrives. "OK, you're free to go home. No bed rest needed. Just let us know if anything else happens."
My general experience with doctors is that you get as many unique opinions as there are doctors in the room. This is not an indictment of the profession. Human bodies are insanely complex, there is way more variation between them than most people realize, and doctors are operating under very very limited time and information.
Having overlapping doctors would likely cause even more patient confusion and increase the risk conflicting treatments. Also, it would obviously double the cost of care.
(My wife and baby were fine. Partial abruption. Very scary and my daughter was born five weeks early, but no other significant problems.)
Doctors are also unlikely to want a 50% pay cut in exchange for shorter hours. They aren’t directly exposed to the risk caused by fatigue since they will have malpractice insurance. Therefore the safer method of care would be simply too expensive, and doctors wouldn’t see an upside.
Part of the shortage is a result of artificially constrained supply as there aren’t enough med school seats to keep up with demand.
The world doesn't run on boolean logic. A solution can improve an issue without solving it completely.
AI fixes this. Imagine the boot time of loading a patient's state from dozens of labs and files vs. a summary that gets you to exactly what they're going to end up remembering anyways. And if a doctor finds something interesting that the AI doesn't flag, they should be flagging it in the chart for the next doctor anyways.
Your solution to information loss during doctor handover is to insert a brainless hallucinating program with zero responsibility into the middle?