Posted on 02/24/2016 9:05:22 AM PST by Oldpuppymax
Two months ago, we posted a story describing how three healthcare-related non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are conspiring to undo hard-fought improvements in work rules, pertaining to surgical resident physicians. The NGOs in question are the American Board of Surgery, the American College of Surgeons, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).
Leading the pack in this endeavor is ACGME, which just five years earlier did cut the number of allowable hours that these residents could put in. As it happens, the cut in hours was forced on the industry, based on outrageous violations in which the stated hours were over 100 per week, but it was commonplace—especially at “prestige†institutions—for the actual hours to be even greater. There were also cases of fatal, or near-fatal medical errors that were attributed to resident overwork and burnout.
The previous article discussed some flaws in the design of the so-called FIRST trial (Flexibility in Duty Hour Requirements for Surgical Trainees) as were revealed in depth by Public Citizen and the American Medical Student Association. Beyond these flaws—which are by no means trivial—the obvious intent of the study is to roll back the ACGME’s 2011 mandatory limits on physician resident work hours, which were adopted to protect both the residents and their patients from serious harm.
Notwithstanding the flaws in study design, on February 2nd, the work was published in the celebrated New England Journal of Medicine. Michael Carome, MD—Director, Public Citizen’s Health Research Group—immediately called out NEJM for violating its own longstanding policies for manuscripts reporting data from human subjects research. Incredibly, the brain trust behind FIRST, led by Karl Y. Bilimoria, MD/MS, of Northwestern University, maintained that no human subjects were involved in work that encompassed 4,330 surgical residents...
(Excerpt) Read more at coachisright.com ...
This would be an excellent task for Ben Carson as either HHS Secretary or Surgeon General.
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