Patients Not Harmed By Doctor Hours Reform

A study of more than 8 million hospitalized U.S. Medicare patients showed no increase in mortality after resident-physician duty hours were limited.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found no significant relative increases or decreases in the odds of patients deaths before or after the reforms in 2003.

Duty hour reform — 80-hour work weeks, one off-duty day in seven days, no more than 24 continuous work hours and and at least 10 hours of rest between duty period — had been prompted by concern about medical error deaths, explained study author, Dr. Kevin G. Volpp, of the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, who examined death rates in more than 3,000 hospitals.

In a accompanying JAMA editorial, Dr. David Meltzer and Dr. Vineet Arora, of the University of Chicago, wrote: These results, together with another recent large study that found some evidence of mortality reductions in medical patients in teaching hospitals following duty hour reforms using data from a large fraction of U.S. hospitals, may be reassuring to those who feared that duty hour reforms would adversely affect patient outcomes. These studies may also provide some encouraging news for others who had hoped that duty hour reforms would improve outcomes.