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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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one of the reasons we work stupidly long shifts is because someone so sleep deprived they are drunk is safer than having someone else come in for a complicated patient.

How do you handle this when you do eventually have to switch off? I'm imaging trying to hand off a tricky piece of software to a new team every 24 hours - I guess a short interview plus some notes? How complicated is a complicated patient?

As is usual for us there's a whole bunch of different ways this happens. I'm going to simplify some of this for ease of reading.

Surgical rounding team (ex: post-op patients). A team of 4 residents manages 80 post-op patients they know nothing about. Some of them are very complicated, but they are complicated in a relatively small number of ways that can be picked up and put down as needed. Someone prints out a hand out from the computer that tells the residents everything they should need to know, which is generated automatically. Some particularly weird situations get handed off verbally. Nobody remembers what was said. Every X amount of hours the team changes over or new people come on and off. Shift times are generally vague, they exist on paper but emergencies are constantly happening and surgeries run long. One intern (first year resident) who doesn't really know anything about anything is hypothetically in charge of making sure floor patients don't die, while everyone else hides in the OR as much as possible. Handoff risk: low-to medium.

Radiology. You finish your worklist and everything is done. No handover. Ish. Handoff risk: low.

Medical floors. During the day 12 residents manage 120 patients. 2 them stay overnight or two fresh people going on to work 16 hour nights for a week straight. If something happens overnight you hope it's someone you know, otherwise you look at the chart, the notes are good because it's medicine, ideally if something complicated is expected to happen the day team told you about it. Sometimes they don't or it's a new problem. Fuck. Also the nurse will call you at 10pm asking for an update on the discharge plan because the family asked. You don't know because you've never met this patient before and never will. Handoff risk: normally low-to medium, but sometimes high.

Surgery. You don't hand off, you can't. Handoff risk: incredibly high, but because the docs stay until they are done, low. If the surgery has NPs/PAs involved (most typically Anesthesia). Can be hugely problematic since they don't have responsibility and try to stick with shift times.

Surgical/Medical ICU. Patients have failures of multiple organ systems. Documentation is good and on paper tells you what is up. In real life you lose track of how often fluid or blood products went in. Complicated stuff happens constantly. You takeover a patient and have to tell their kids and their mom is going to die. You've never meet the mom. Actually that was the other patient. This person is a dad and is fine. Fuck. Okay now someone else is dying. How many units did the first person get again? You've worked 90 hours a week for the last two weeks. Handoff risk: fuck my life.

Obviously I'm making this sound more ridiculous than it is for the most part, but in real life we do endeavor to write good documentation that supposedly allows an oncoming doctor to pick up the patient, we have handoff reports with automatically summarized information, and a verbal signout (or written via computer for like a weekend daytime doc on a psych unit) happens. But the reality and complexity of the situation often gets in the way.

Lots of research has been done to get this as safe as possible, and it works to some extent, but you can't substitute for actually knowing the patient and being the one who did the surgery or admitted them last week.

Thank you very much for the explanation.