In the first semester of nursing school one of the professors said to “get used to getting six hours of sleep a night because this is how it’s gonna be”.
Healthy adults need 7-9h of sleep btw.
And that’s just how it starts.
16h workdays are not uncommon for CNAs or nurses. On call shifts for nurses, NPs and MDs are often 24h. I once met a nurse anesthesiologist who would just nap at the hospital between patients when she was on call, because 24h on call. I mean….does any of this sound safe? Or good? But it’s an expected part of many many healthcare jobs.
I’m a paediatric registrar at the moment and we have 24 hour on-call. This, plus morning handover, means I often am at work for 26 hours straight, and awake for over 28.
We do this one in every four days.
Dedicated night cover would allow safe staffing for patients and medical trainees. Night shifts mean the person on overnight comes in after a full 8 hours of sleep, rather than being someone who just did 12 hours of work during the day and is continuing that into the night. 24 hour call is inhumane and unsafe for patients and staff. My partner drives me home and I fall asleep in the car. By the end of the night I have hardly any idea what I’m saying anymore. It’s just not reasonable.
Our 24-hour call sounds reasonable on paper - it’s home call, you can sleep and just go in when there’s something happening. It used to work well, you’d get called perhaps once or twice a night to go in for a delivery. But as our population has grown and there are more births and more sick kids, our nights are becoming almost constant work in-hospital.
Healthcare needs to change in a lot of ways, and the first bare-minimum thing is to treat healthcare workers like people who have human needs like sleep, food, and water.
The images are screenshots of a short Twitter thread by @/alexhaagaard that reads:
At some point we should probably have a conversation about how the normalization and glorification of physical exhaustion during medical training contributes to producing deeply ableist doctors.
Like a) it makes the field completely inaccessible to many disabled people whose knowledge is deeply needed there and b) it supports a deeply fucked up worldview in which pain and fatigue are things you can and should “just push through.”
The first stage in making a pot is to dig the clay out of the ground. Pieces of grit or plant matter must be removed before the clay can be used. This was done in ancient times, as it is today, by mixing the clay with water and letting the heavier impurities sink to the bottom. This process could…
