Are these really the people that should be required to work so much? Isn’t their job about handling life and death daily? Wouldn’t we want exactly these people to come fully rested to work every single day and be fully staffed?
I don’t know if there are jobs with similar stakes that are so carelessly staffed and disgustingly paid.
That study doesn’t really address the issue here though. That study demonstrated hand-off risks. But as far as I can read, it didn’t address shift length at all. All the providers in question had 8 hour shifts.
Obviously hand-offs produce certain risks. But that’s a trivial question. Obviously changing shifts will have some negative effect as providers must get up to speed. But the right question to ask isn’t “do hand-offs produce risks?” The right question to ask is, “if long shifts are used, do the reduced medical mistakes from the shift change counteract the increased medical mistakes from fatigue and unreasonable shift length?”
Do you have any studies that show this? Otherwise the benefits of long shifts are pure conjecture and drivel.