Each spring, thousands of medical students across the United States render their fate into one of the most bewildering processes of higher education: the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP). The program was developed in 1952 as a means to “relieve the pressure and inequity of free market recruitment, and to establish a uniform playing field with educational boundaries” with regards to residency training programs. Prior to this, the process of achieving a desirable residency spot was fraught with chaos, with multiple different application forms and processes, not to mention false promises and false information. Read more →

Residency training in the United States has historically been a period of abusive hours and intense training. Until recently, there was no limit to the number of hours per week a resident could work. In fact, that has something to do with why they’re called “residents” in the first place: they practically lived in the hospitals in which they worked.

Then came the Libby Zion case, in which a young woman died while under the care of overtired residents. Suddenly America realized that it probably wasn’t a good idea to have inexperienced doctors taking care of really sick people on less than three hours of sleep per night. Read more →

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 →