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COPYRIGHT 2005 International Medical News Group
Holly J. Kramer, M.D., finds it ironic that, given the emphasis in recent years on medical residents getting enough sleep to perform optimally, no one seems to be thinking about the well-being of attending physicians when it comes to getting adequate shut-eye.
"If you think about most people who are in private practice, they have to get up in the middle of the night, go to the emergency room and see patients, and then go to clinic [the] next day," said Dr. Kramer, an epidemiologist at Loyola University Medical Center (LUMC) in Maywood, Ill.
"They don't have anyone saying, 'You haven't gotten 8 hours of sleep. You need to go back home." We're putting so much emphasis on residents, yet there's no emphasis on all the other people who are taking care of patients [and] also might be sleep deprived," she said.
The issue hit home earlier this year when her department chair invited a sleep expert to talk to the attending physicians about the dangers of sleep deprivation. Dr. Kramer was pregnant with her first child at the time, and she began to wonder how the lack of sleep that accompanies a new baby would affect her practice when she returns from maternity leave.
"It made me worried about what it's going to be like to juggle all of this and go to work on very little sleep--[like] going through a 'pseudoresidency' all over again--yet I'm not going to have anyone telling me I need to go home and get rest," she said. "It's something that a lot of attendings have to deal...
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