After waiting hours to see the doctor for a 2-minute visit, some patients have resorted to giving a bill to their physician.

It sounds extreme, but economist Alan Krueger writes that the cost of patient waiting, estimated to be $240 billion in 2007, is neglected when considering the cost of health care.

I’ll be the first to admit that many doctors do not appropriately value patient time, and, under normal circumstances, there (more…)

Surgical residents in the United States are currently restricted to working less than 80 hours per week.

If you think that’s extreme, consider what’s happening the UK, where surgeons are capped at 58 hours per week (via Dr. Wes). Furthermore, that cap is set to go down to 48 hours.

Apparently, these caps are rarely enforced, as “only 25% of surgeons think their human resource departments accurately reflect their actual working (more…)

The Institute of Medicine recently recommended a requirement that medical and surgical residents have a minimum sleep period of 5 hours in any 24-hour work period, with a maximum shift length of 16 hours. This was a follow-up to the 2003 ruling which limited resident work-hours to 80 hours per week.

That is the focus of this week’s poll. Are the Institute of Medicine’s recommended restrictions on residents’ work hours good for medicine?
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It seems inevitable that restricting resident work-hours will soon lead to longer residencies.

An excellent piece in Slate details the price patients will have to pay, as doctors receive less experience. If “the mistakes of drowsy doctors are merely replaced by the mistakes of ill-trained doctors,” then the recommendations would have served no purpose.

Another point is that all resident specialties are lumped under the same (more…)