Most Interns’ Schedules Violate Work Hour Limits Finds Study

Landrigan, et. al. “Interns’ Compliance With ACGME Work-Hour Limits.” JAMA, Sept. 6, 2006, 296(9).
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A study in the September 6, 2006 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that medical interns routinely work hours in excess of the limits set by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), the body responsible for regulating physician training in the US. Current ACGME hours policy, instituted in July 2003, limits intern and resident physicians to an 80 hour work week (averaged over four weeks), and prohibits residents from working more than 30 consecutive hours. However, the study reports that 83.6 percent of the interns surveyed told of work hours in violation of the ACGME standards to some degree, with 67.4 percent reporting shifts longer than 30 consecutive hours and 43 percent working more than 80 hours a week averaged over four weeks.

These findings undercut ACGME’s own publicized statistics on compliance, which claim that only five percent of residency programs violate its hours standards. Critics of these numbers argue that ACGME’s survey methods are flawed, as intern and resident physicians, intimidated by the possibility that their program might lose accreditation for noncompliance, report false data that feigns adherence to ACGME guidelines. Such discrepancies raise serious doubts about the accreditation body’s capacity to enforce its own policies regarding work hours.