The Nightshift Can Scare You
Have you ever checked yourself into hospital for an overnight stay and just lay in your bed watching all the activity all through the day then suddenly the intercom announces 'visiting hours are over', then the activity dies down and then the lights are turned down low so the patients can settle in for the night?
All that hospital staff - nurses, doctors, technicians, maintenance - where do they all disappear to?
They've left for the night and now it's
Nightshift.
This is the time of the day that if something is gonna go wrong, it's really gonna go wrong. There's only a skelton staff on duty. One nurse now has a lot of folks depending on him or her. Try to find a doctor. You'll find a few very tired-looking interns, some have already slipped into an empty bed with instructions to wake him or her if things get dicey.
Many people have vowed to avenge the untimely death of a relative. Lawyer and journalist Sidney Zion actually did so -- to the benefit of patients and doctors-in-training nationwide.
After his 18-year-old daughter Libby died within 24 hours of an emergency hospital admission in 1984, Zion learned that her chief doctors had been medical residents covering dozens of patients and receiving relatively little supervision. His anger set in motion a series of reforms, most notably a series of work hour limitations instituted by the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), that have revolutionized modern medical education.
