Reform to Reduce Resident Fatigue Does Not Improve Post-Surgical Outcomes, Study Finds

In 2011, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) implemented a reform to restrict the number of duty hours for residents, the hope being to reduce fatigue-related errors that could harm patients. A study published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons evaluated whether the ACGME reform improved surgical outcomes of patients from 5 surgical specialties (neurosurgery, obstetrics/gynecology, orthopaedic surgery, urology, and vascular surgery).

The study authors obtained surgical data from teaching and non-teaching surgical hospitals, 1 year before and 2 years after the reform was implemented, and the clinical outcome assessed was death or serious morbidity wthin 30 days of the surgery. However, at least for the 2 year period post-reform, the authors failed to find any significant correlation between reduced hours of resident duty and the 2 clinical outcomes being assessed.