(Update) More Sleep For Medical Residents Means Safer Patients

Boston (dbTechno) - According to a new report, the safety of patients would be greatly increased if medical residents were able to get more sleep and be more alert during their long shifts.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) is responsible for looking over these medical resident programs.

Since 2003, they have had guidelines set to keep them from working no more than 80-hours per week on average for a 4-week period.

On top of that, they are limited to not work more than 30-hours straight.

A new report though from the Institute of Medicine aims to change that up a bit.

IOM, a part of the National Academies of Science, is proposing that medical residents get at least 5 hours of sleep after every 16-hours that they work.

They are responsible for advising the government on science and technology, and believe that with the long hours medical residents work, the sleep could help a great deal.

They are not proposing to cut back work hours, but instead are aiming to simply break up the shifts more with different sleep scheduled to keep them more alert, and patients safer.