Are these really the people that should be required to work so much? Isn’t their job about handling life and death daily? Wouldn’t we want exactly these people to come fully rested to work every single day and be fully staffed?
I don’t know if there are jobs with similar stakes that are so carelessly staffed and disgustingly paid.
Halstead was a brilliant surgeon who decided to replace sleep with cocaine, would stay up for a week straight then berate his students for not having the same “work ethic.” Over the years it’s morphed into kind of an initiation ritual where new doctors are forced to work, ironically, medically inadvisably long shifts to prove their dedication to the job. It’s insane and has led to countless injury and deaths from sleep deprived staff, but that’s just The Way Things Are Done.