Training Trends: British surgeon offers cautionary tale about limit on trainee duty hours

The restrictions have also limited the amount of time that trainees can spend doing emergency work, he said.

Impact

The effects of the limits on training in the U.K. will not be known until it is time for the new doctors to begin working independently, he said. “I fear that we may be creating a new generation of trainees; we won’t know until 2014 whether this has had an impact,” he said. “I suspect, and most of us suspect, and certainly the managers of hospitals in the U.K. are concerned, seriously concerned, that the product of doctors that we are producing and turning out at the moment will not be equivalent of what we’ve had before.”

Lord Ribeiro urged his U.S. counterparts to challenge leaders’ expectations about the new rules.

“It behooves us all, and you, to challenge government to provide the evidence,” he said, “get them to do an audit, make them provide the evidence that by reducing hours, you are improving the outcomes for patients.”