Health & Healthcare | By January 04, 2009 | By T. A. McNamee, MD | 2 Comments

Sleeping on the Job – A Program Director’s Take on IOM Recommendations

I’ve been thinking about sleeping a lot lately. Not in the sense of curling up under the blankets for hours on end, but in the sense of thinking about the topic of sleeping. As the program director of an internal medicine residency program, one of my jobs is to make sure that my residents are rested enough to provide appropriate patient care. I was under the impression that they were. But recently, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) came to the conclusion that many residents are still sleep-deprived, posing a threat to the safety of patients under their care across the United States. Based on this conclusion, the IOM made the bold recommendation that after 16 hours of continuous work, residents must be allowed an uninterrupted five hour block of time for sleep, preferably between the hours of 10pm and 8am. Read more →