Why So Many Young Doctors Work Such Awful Hours
The path to becoming a doctor is notoriously difficult. Following pre-med studies and four years of medical school, freshly minted M.D.s must spend anywhere from three to seven years (depending on their chosen specialty) training as “residents” at an established teaching hospital. Medical residencies are institutional apprenticeships—and are therefore structured to serve the dual, often dueling, aims of training the profession’s next generation and minding the hospital’s labor needs.
How to manage this tension between “education and service” is a perennial question of residency training, according to Janis Orlowski, the chief health-care officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Orlowski says that the amount of menial labor residents are required to perform, known in the profession as “scut work,” has decreased "tremendously" since she was a resident in the 1980s. But she acknowledges that even "institutions that are committed to education … constantly struggle with this,” trying to stay on the right side of the boundary between training and taking advantage of residents.
Despite improvements brought about by the good-faith efforts of the AAMC and other organizations, the physical and emotional demands on residents remain without parallel in the modern American economy. Some of these pressures are inherent in the nature of the profession: Most people cannot imagine a workday mental lapse or error in judgment depriving another of their hearing, brain functioning, or even life. But those in the medical profession are expected to swallow hard, cry it
