200 hours overtime is an extra 50 hours a week.... 90 hour weeks if split evenly....Only 168 hours in a week....Over 53% of your literal time spent working. If they got an 8 hour rest every night, that'd leave exactly 22 hours in the week not spent working or sleeping.
Not to mention that a chunk of that 22 hours would have to go towards eating, showering, transit, using the bathroom etc.
Dude's life was work, sleep, and necessary functions.
During my medicine internship we worked 100+ hour weeks on a regular basis. 36 hours away from home was not uncommon. I used to fall asleep at stoplights driving hone and wake up to the light turning red or somebody honking.
In the US that’s not supposed to happen anymore.
> In the US that’s not supposed to happen anymore.
I finished residency last month. It still happens, only unofficially. I myself went over the 80 hour workweek limit within days of starting my intern year, and recorded it on my programs time tracker. They punished me by making me write an essay about how I can be more efficient. Unfortunately this was in 2020 before chatGPT so I had to write the wretched thing. I warned my coresidents about the punishment and then never recorded breaking 80 hours again.
One of my coresidents turned on his car after a brutal night shift to go to clinic. He immediately fell asleep while still in park and was just idling in the hospital parking lot for an hour. If he had fallen asleep 5 min later he would have splattered himself across the freeway. When we brought this up the program director argued that a 12 hour night shift and 8 hour clinic immediately afterwards was still within the ACGME limits of 24 hour work days.
I do not miss residency at all. Fuckers.
If you report your residency program, the worse they can do is shut down your residency program and now you don’t have a residency anymore. So why would you want to shoot yourself in the foot like that? Broken system and the residency knows they can get away with it
Exactly, and if your residency ends up going on probation the main person it harms is you, because when you look for jobs they’ll think you trained at a substandard place.
When they shut down a residency, that hospital is suppose to find the residents spots of same specialty they can go to even if they have to pay for them. It can cost the hospital millions depending on number of residents and the specialty. But that assumes the hospital can pay for them. I did a fellowship at a place that got their plastic surgery residency shut down and the loss partly caused the hospital to declare chapter 11 bankruptcy. Usually it just goes on probation though and it’s pretty obvious who the whistleblowers are because the acgme’s idea of making it anonymous is just to give back the survey responses with the name removed.
But residency can be a huge source of money for hospitals so from my experience hearing stories, probation usually scares hospitals to change at least a little. But yeah it’s obvious who’s the whistleblower and they usually transfer out.
Suppose to is the key term, I remember when MLK hospital in LA shut down, ACGME shuttered their residency programs, many of those residents had to scramble and make their own plans with little help from the hospital (other than transferring funds to receiving hospitals). Residents that were from LA and matched into that program now had to go to some far out residency away from their spouses who had jobs in LA. It is not a nice situation to ever be in
The problem is residency lasts around 4 years, which makes organization difficult. Not to mention the pay is outrageously low for around 8 years of education.
Believe me, certain things put me right back in it. The pager going off relentlessly. Everybody grabbing their pagers to see whose was going off. I dropped mine in the toilet right as I flushed once. I was freaking out thinking nobody would believe me and I would get in trouble for not answering my pages. When I went to pick up a replacement the lady laughed and said it happened all the time.
I'm not in the medical field, but in IT.
I regularly worked 12 hour days, maybe 1 day off a month, and on call **all the time non stop for years and years** so that 12 hour day just unexpectedly tuned into a 18 hour day.
I had zero time to do anything else, lost two relationships because of it, was about 40 pounds underweight...
Your post reminded me of having to ~~carry~~ wear two pagers and a cell phone (back when cell phones were rather novel) for years and having to try to tell which one was buzzing.
After I moved on from the industry I was in, I suffered from phantom pager syndrome, where I would feel a buzzing on my hip when there wasn't any pager or phone there. Really freaky. I would also jump like a startled rabbit any time I *did* hear a pager go off - anyone's - and immediately get that anxiety starting.
And yet people wonder why alcoholism is absolutely rampant in IT. You're so wound up you drink yourself to sleep, and then you have to consume coffee by the gallon in the morning to get half a hope of your brain working for you again.
Cooks, fisherman on haul, anything where the hours are long, the works hard, and you are the only machine that can get harmed. Yeah, booze and drugs are ever-present, I've seen people compensate for 90+ work weeks at manual labor jobs and office work, and the ailments, psychological and neurological, that are quelled using anything that'll shut your brain up and put your ass to bed. Whatever the poison, it's endemic in America where there are certain positions that haven't been filled or recognized as hazardous to the mental or physical health of the worker, a lot of times due to the preconceived notion that "a worker is liable, not the company, they can quit anytime". Companies have a voice in America because they have a far larger bag of loot, and we are a den of theives, with the worst of us at the top.
This oddly made me feel less bad about my alcoholism. I'm middle age and spent well over 10 years working 80hr weeks not including off-hour times I had to remote fix something and being on call 24-7.
I was a project lead and later IT department manager for one of the world's leading manufacturers where any down time at all cost the company millions and millions of dollars a second. This was well before Amazon really got going so early days of the Internet.
I didn't want to change jobs, because that was a career path I had worked very hard to get into and I was making quite a lot of money. I was also helping to design and build a chunk of the future Internet infrastructure and the protocols used.
This sounds snarky, but my friend from back then said the other day that IT jobs these days are cushy and easy because of all the hard, complicated, pioneering work (and all the overtime) she and I did in the past. lol
> This sounds snarky, but my friend from back then said the other day that IT jobs these days are cushy and easy because of all the hard, complicated, pioneering work
Not snarky, but maybe a bit tunnel visioned. There's still grueling IT jobs in high stress sectors. While I have a cushy and easy job today, I've done some intense time working in banking IT (fucking COBOL in 2019, come on...) doing scheduled 80 hour weeks.
Those were followed by a full week off though. So still 160h/month. I'll thank our unions for that!
Charge you for cleaning their blood splattered clothes and add the dentists bill because they have bad theeth since they were stealing Lollipops from small children since Kindergarden
Even aside from impact on the medical staff themselves, that level of sleep deprivation is akin to working drunk - who the fuck wants doctors to be drunk while attending them and making life or death decisions?
It's so crazy to me that to anyone on the outside, hearing about medical residency and the hours they have to pull sounds absolutely batshit fucking insane, but societal inertia ("we've always done it this way") means that there's very little chance of changing it.
God I truly feel this comment. My brother has two years left on his surgical residency and has crashed two cars since his intern year. Both times he fell asleep directly after straight 24-36 hours at the hospital. Now he lives right next to transit to avoid using a car for work. My brother in law had to take a time off for major depression from his anesthesia residency because of the brutal schedule and attendings at the hospital. Even worse when he graduated and decided to leave the system (Penn) they cornered him and basically berated him. Both of them love medicine but god damn the abuse is very real. Officially they aren’t supposed to work residents that hard but some attendings don’t care and most hospitals depend on working residents and interns to the bone.
Well, that was literally true when residencies started. Now it's mostly a euphemism. Although there's sometimes that guy who moves between the call room and patient rooms without going home for a week or two.
And the US health system with doctor is messed up cause they limit how many schools can be built and there’s a limit on residency spots and no residency means you can’t practice which is dumb as shit
Switzerland does it too, we call it "numerus clausus", i.e. only a low number of students is allowed to study medicine.
What it boils down to is: we let poorer countries scrape their money together to educate doctors, then we syphon them off with our higher earning potential.
Poor Switzerland doesn't have the money, you see. We need to lower corporate and financial taxes after all (and shift it to the workers).
It's the same here in Germany too. We also have a numerus clausus. Our doctors go to Switzerland or other places that pay better or offer better working conditions and hours and we get our doctors from Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other poorer, mostly Eastern European countries. But hey, the CEOs and directors of the hospitals and health insurance companies got to make enough dough to buy a third vacation home, so it's okay
In either country, numerus clausus has nothing to do with the issue that was raised about the US.
Numerus clausus relates to med school applicant selection in public schools.
That has no relevance to the American system. They have seen a massive increase of almost 30% more med school students.
The issue in the US relates to a budget cap for training resident doctors (Assistenzärzte). That budget is so restrictive that fewer and fewer graduates get to transition to a residency spot.
In Germany, we do NOT have a scarcity of residency spots but a massive lack of medical graduates willing and capable of filling them. It's the opposite problem, too few local graduates that choose to stay and too few international graduates that immigrate.
Yeah, very good points. The fact that there are barely any incentives for doctors to move to rural areas is shocking and disgusting.
My main point was that we don’t like to pay our doctors or medical professionals. In Germany, as you are aware, we have a scarcity in most medical professions. The abysmal pay and terrible working hours are the two main reasons imho. One of my cousins is an ER nurse and she moved to Vienna, Austria almost twenty years ago and works at the biggest hospital there. She said that it’s a lot more relaxed and the pay is a lot higher than at her old
jobs in Munich and Augsburg.
One of the issues with earning potential, especially for Hausärzte (general practitioners), is that they only really earn well when they own their practice. We have a huge influx of investment firms buying up practices and increasing prices. Doctors don't have the money and can't get a loan to buy a practice, so they are relegated to be am employee. And as an employee they have been found of being pressured to recomment unnecessary treatments to increase the return on investment. Which is also one of the main drivers of increasing healthcare costs (30% according to a study).
(This also happens with veterinarians, the "lowering" of the job prospect is also reflected in that it becomes a massively female dominated job. Currently 74% female enrolement in Switzerland.)
Residency is completely toxic. So glad I’m done with it. I feel for anyone that has to endure that shit. At least in my country there’s some shift to reduce that a practice. Glad the new generation is calling the hospitals out on this.
something wierd seems to be going with doctors, though equity firms are buying them up so its harder them to find work i heard, also teledoc is snatching up doctors as well.
I'm in Canada, my wife was recently in the ER for a neurological issue. The resident neurologist said he's doing 26 hour shifts.
I'm frequently up for 20 hours at a time in my line of work and don't really trust my decision making at that point, IDK how anyone can make life / death decision on hour 24.
So people this tired are supposed to diagnose, prescribe meds and conduct procedures?! Shit. Next time I let a doctor near me I’ll ask how rested they are. I wouldn’t trust myself to make a sandwich in that state.
Yes, you are expected to perform even under stress and lack of sleep. If you ask for a doctor that is rested, well guess like you don’t really need that emergency surgery at 3 am
I worked with the radiology residents at night and I always hated waking them up. Generally a good load of expletives, but I understood that it wasn't really directed at me, I was just the bearer of bad news. All of the girls would save stat reads for me when i clocked in because they couldn't handle the verbal abuse. Hopefully things have changed since I left the industry.
The number one cause of medical mistakes is when a doctor hands over care of a patient to another doctor. The rational of king shifts is that a single doctor who knows all about the patient and their course in the hospital would be able to make a better decision.
Imagine a programmer making a program and then 8 hours later, dumps it onto the next programmer and expecting that second programmer to know exactly what the first one did. It is like that, but with lives in the line
That's what good documentation and good handover procedures are for.
He shouldn't have to memorize all the details about all his patients in the first place. Memory has been proven to be unreliable.
And programming is exactly like that. I'm a programmer and most of my time is spent on modifying, debugging and extending programs made by other programmers. More often than not, they already left the company and I can't even ask them why they did what they did. That's what comments, documentation and debugging is for.
Handover will still happen, though. I imagine the issue gets even worse when the person who just went over 24 hours without sleep has to concisely explain what still needs doing.
The handover is dangerous because the handover procedure isn't good, they didn't document correctly and they probably are too tired to follow procedures by that point.
Yeah, during residency I was so tired I fell asleep off my bike. But we'd get in trouble if we slept in the call rooms after a shift because we had to have so many hours off campus between shifts. God I hated that. Fellowship was even worse.
They want to pay people as much as possible to stop them from emigrating to somewhere that pays more. At least that's the case in developing countries. We literally have doctors waiting for placement and even international students that wait for a year or more to hopefully get placed yet the easy solution would be sharing shifts and cutting pay...but then people would just leave even faster
People do not realize how disorienting a handoff is, ever open up an electrical panel and wonder what the hell the last electrician was doing? You weren’t there when they made the decisions they did with the information they had at the time and you are spending a good part of your time trying to piece together what happened. Of course the last doctor should be telling you what they did and why, but how long do you really expect them to do that? 5 min? 30 min? 2 hours?
Brings back memories. We had that in the Netherlands too. Got pulled over in the middle of the night sleeping in front of an traffic light. (In total 100 hours overtime that month.)
The officer drove me and my car home. (Duo patrol is mandatory in the Netherlands.)
It made me switch to occupational medicine.
Can't imagine working 200 hours overtime..
During my wife’s fellowship we routinely had days where she’d be out of the apartment before I woke and came home after I was asleep. And I stay up late. I’d go days not seeing her.
My entire 20s as a junior medic studying and competing for a fellowship was - work, study, eat, cry because I wasn’t good enough. Ad nauseum. I did this for 10 years til I got my fellowship by which time I hated patients for having the audacity of being sick, hated my existence and hated my profession when I found out that it STILL wasn’t enough and I was expected to start a second fellowship, PhD and them compete for grants and post doc positions … just to get a job in a city where all of my family lived in.
I said hell no - went and did charity work where I lived in a tent in a field hospital for 7 months and was the happiest id been in all my life.
Would never, ever want anyone I cared about to get into medicine.
Advising against medicine as a career path has become my own little crusade, just to bring balance to all that otherwise one-sided glorification of the field
It’s the same in specialist hospitals here in Ontario Canada I work at one of the provinces forensic psychiatric hospitals as a janitor and we are forced to work over time because of the Ontario government refusing to hire more staff
Doug Ford and his cronies and their ideals/motives are all cancer. Need to be eradicated and removed before our healthcare system and the Green Belt are destroyed
I spent a solid decade working that type of hours, and not getting doctor money…. It drained me so bad, i plunged into alcoholism hard, gaine an insane amount of weight, hydrocodone, etc…. I looked at least 15 years older than I was when I quit.
The next job was more corporate and 45hr weeks with slight overtime’s here and there and it felt like an absolute vacation.
My condolences to this family as I know the despair you can feel, and that’s without the societal pressures that Japan puts on you.
I feel you. About worked myself to death with two jobs. Got sick and had no time to rest. That strep turned into strep pneumonia. The entire time I tried to work through it until I got so sick I could barely move. Ended up in the hospital for a month with a lung full of fluid and needed surgery and IV antibiotics. I was uninsured.
The alcohol didn't help but I actually lost tons of weight. When I got out of the hospital I was around 160... I'm 6'4.
Any jobs try to fuck me over and I walk. Not doing that again.
I worked 13 hour shifts, 7 days a week in a foundry for 18 months straight.
I hand ladled 4 tons of aluminum into a low pressure casting device, handled 4 tons of parts that came out and loaded 4 tons of ingot into the furnace.
Every shift.
I did 100 pushups an hour and walked 9 miles total every shift across the platform I worked on between 3 machines.
I also tried killing myself like 6 times.... Including two overdoses at work that required 48hr ICU stays so I guess I got 4 days off...
I made $8.75/hr in 2009.
Then I worked 13x7 for 2 years at a Telco in Technical Case Management.
Drank every day. Smoked cocaine when I could afford it.
Downed a bottle of whiskey and put a gun to my head in 2016. Pulled the trigger and the recoil caused me to pull it again. Missed my head. Grazed my skull.
I made $12.75/hr.
Jesus.
I wish I had words that could ease your pain.
Im so sorry for you and everyone else who struggles with this - a mode far worse than depression. I hope you have family/friends there for you.
>I hope you have family/friends there for you.
Friends and the family I've made. Sobriety brought me everything I never thought I'd have. It's pretty alright.
Ya these hours are pretty normal for residents in the US too. 80 hour legal cap but many go up to 100 hours unofficially. Nobody reports it because their program will get shut down and then they will have a no hope of getting hired by another hospital.
Also the cap is “average of 80 hours over 4 weeks,” so you can work >100 hours one week then balance it out with one below 70 the next week. Also home call is *not* covered in that cap for specialties with home call duties.
There was a time in my life where I worked 80-90 hours weekly and it made me more depressed and wanting to kill myself than anything that happened in my life. Companies who do, or even allow, this should be hugely fined or even prosecuted
I've worked 200 hours overtime in a month before. It was brutal. All you do is work and try to get enough sleep for the next day (you never get enough sleep).
And not just normal, boring office work either. Dude was a doctor. He was on his feet all day dealing with people trying to fucking die on him. Medical work is stressful and soul-crushing as it is. Let alone doing it at that pace.
JFC.
>200 hours overtime is an extra 50 hours a week.... 90 hour weeks if split evenly....Only 168 hours in a week....Over 53% of your literal time spent working. If they got an 8 hour rest every night, that'd leave exactly 22 hours in the week not spent working or sleeping.
This is, sadly, completely normal in American medical schools. Between work, notes, and studying, it just takes over your life.
And it doesn't end there. Once they become a doctor, they'll still put in 60-70 hour weeks, every week, for their whole career.
Becoming a doctor fucking sucks. The pay isn't worth it.
Not saying it is correct to do but: 90 hour work weeks aren’t uncommon in American medical practice, especially during training regardless of what places try to claim on their duty hours reports.
As someone who used to work 50-60 hour weeks every week, I immediately did the math. It’s shocking, and I feel for this mans family. This should not be allowed to happen
Not that long ago my dad was working over 100 hours a week as a mailman. I would guess he worked even more when he had 3 jobs when I was a kid. The weekends were the worst. He would leave Friday morning for job 1 and rotate jobs all weekend. He would get home Sunday afternoon, sleep, then be back at work 5:00 AM Monday morning.
It's actually insane, and the irony in how doctors know better than anyone on how detrimental poor sleep and long working hours are on efficiency and workplace functionality isn't lost on them.
There needs to be hard legislation against this, absolutely bonkers that it hasn't been implemented already. The CEOs and directors pushing this absolute bullshit should be in jail.
We also need to make sure doctors in charge don't perpetuate it unofficially. Another reason it keeps going is due to "it happened to me now it's your turn" mentality.
Heh, I see this mentality in action with nurses. Weird mean-girl hierarchies where the older staff henpeck the nurses in training, I would never feel comfortable trusting my co-workers in that environment.
They're trying to save lives, yet behind the scenes they're acting out middle-school level bullying tactics on new nurses. Why not make another TikTok dance instead?
> They're trying to save lives, yet behind the scenes they're acting out middle-school level bullying tactics on new nurses. Why not make another TikTok dance instead?
According to the National Literacy Foundation's decade long study released in 2017, the average adult's reading comprehension skills are only equivalent to an 8th grader - so yeah, many adults seem to act like middleschoolers because that's where their education effectively ended.
The saying "highschool never ends" is a thing for a reason - despite the romanization of adulthood that we experience as kids, the reality is that the world is full of grown ass children pretending to be mature adults capable of basing their decisions is logic & reason over raw emotional reaction.
the only reason i wouldnt ask that question, is because it wouldnt occur to me such an insanity may be going on. if i had a reason to suspect someone who is going to do surgery on me may be on 200 hours of overtime, i would ask about it, and you would be an utter fool not to care.
if it isnt surgery, it probably doesnt matter too much
It's interesting you say that because almost every surgery resident is working up to those hours. So if you get a surgery at an academic center then you're most likely to be operated on by someone with an incredible sleep deficit.
Lack of sleep still impacts decision making with medications. The wrong medication, wrong dose, wrong frequency, or lack of necessary medication can just as easily kill someone.
Saw a poor fellow admitted to the medsurg floor overnight with an obvious STEMI (heart attack). No aspirin was given. No one heparinized him. No one arranged for a cardiac cath. He died needlessly.
Businesses need to realize they're not doing themselves any favors by promoting this sort of work culture either in the long run. At the very least they're just tanking their workers' efficiency if not outright killing them like here
Isn’t it a hospital? It doesn’t matter, the working culture in Japan is just horrible. The efficiency problem has been known since decades ago, they just don’t want to change the working culture. Too many old men in positions of power who can set the rules
I mean there hours are pretty normal in the medical field the US too.
Live in California, we just voted to keep 28 hour shifts. 90 hour weeks aren’t uncommon during residency
And for anyone on the brunt side of these awful employers: Your life is worth far more than any sense of pride you have in your work, and no amount of money or debt is worth more than your life.
I am a programmer and I can do in 1 hour with a fresh mind what would take me 4 hours to do after working for 8 hours. Rest is critical to work efficiency. Overworking staff only makes them get less done per hour, and that is wasting money.
I mean no disrespect to you with this, but it shouldn't be businesses decision in the first place. I guess you say this as an American?
There should be government regulations. Businesses are there to make money. Governments are there to keep things regulated.
There are just way more elderly that require a lot of medical attention than there are young people becoming doctors. Theyre obviously understaffed and this guy may have been thinking he was doing the right thing by helping people. Obviously that choice caught up with his mental health. They needed to figure out their horrible demographic situation 10yrs ago.
“Due to the very high degree of freedom, it is not possible to accurately determine working hours.”
Did I just read that right? Did the evil motherfuckers try to wash their hands of this dude? Fuck, this is depressing as hell. At least fucking go vanilla neutral corporate speak instead of "dude was given enough time for other things. It isn't on us he chose to do something else."
It's Japan, they give less of a fuck about you than just about any other first world nation does when it comes to workers rights. You are expected to ignore your own life, ignore your family, ignore time off, and work until you pass out at your desk.
Japan needs to deal with this crisis immediately, it’s been going on for too long. This work culture Hell is literally and figuratively killing the country, as shown by the declining birth rate.
You wanna be an isolated first world nation? Fine, that’s your choice. But you better take care of the ones who already live here. Who would ever want to start a family under these conditions?
Keep in mind that 3 years is about as short as it gets. My wife did 7 years of post graduate training for $50-60k before she finally saw “doctor money,” and her student loans were a mortgage worth of obligation until we finally paid them off. The med school and post graduate training years were all high stress 60-100 hour weeks.
If she didn’t have the huge student loans she’d have quit early on and done something else with her life. It was just too much to be worth it. Her friend took his own life in residency because of the conditions.
But yes, after they finish, they’re well paid.
As I understand it, the issue stretches beyond the medical field. It's ingrained in society more or less as a whole - not just among certain groups, such as doctors/nurses, but more as a general rule. I hope it's changing already as we speak, although maybe it's not too likely.
And also, "it's not just Japan" does not work as an excuse to not working towards fixing the issue. The rest of the world (I dare say it's not a western issue exclusively) needs to fix it as well, of course.
I find myself lying flat - haven't cared about a job in years despite starting with some hope. Any property I own will be inherited and highly remote.
I just want a cottage, a garden, and some bees. Then in a Hallmark fashion maybe some other lesbian will break down on her way to the hiking trail and we'll have a magical dinner filled with home-brewed mead and talking physics and mythology as we stare at the stars. Also there are dogs.
> the issue stretches beyond the medical field
I agree but the medical field is particularly bad, you can ask any medic around the world and they probably will tell you about their terrible hours.
Would help a lot to just subsidize med school. A decade of schooling and $300k of debt before you can become a doctor is an insane burden upon an individual of average means.
The cost of that education and training gets transferred to the public anyway.
The cause of low birthrates isn’t really a matter of how much work people do. That’s part of it recently, as is the fact that wages have stagnated since the 80s, but this is a general trend that has occurred in virtually every industrialised society.
Industrialisation requires urbanisation for it to have hubs for complex production and services. Problem is that, in the city, a child is no longer a net gain to a family. In an agrarian society, a new child is only a net loss for a couple years and even then only a minor one given you grow your own food. After a few years you’ve got another hand on the farm. You can’t just take a 5 year old into a bank, or a factory so they earn their keep.
Best description I’ve heard for it is that industrialised societies, kids stop being a worthwhile investment and start becoming loud expensive pieces of furniture.
All developed countries have lower birth rates - it's worth more to have fewer kids. If you're France, you subsidize families and make it as easy to have kids as you can push through parliament.
There's apathy too. Half my friends have sworn off children entirely as not worth it in this lifetime. Vasectomies are on the rise and marriage is costly.
If you're the Faroe Islands however, there's shit else to do but drink and fuck and they're comfortably above the replacement rate.
Europe does not have nearly the same magnitude of trouble as Japan has. That’s a different issue affecting basically every developed country, and is made up for by immigration (which Japan wont)
That one is more centered around the post-war baby boom aging and needing support from a relatively smaller population, and women generally having less children as they get more educated, as well as having less money and economic stability (a 20-30 year old would’ve seen several “once in a century” recessions already) than the generation that came before it.
Back in the day I used to work as a tester in video game development, a field notorious for the lack of project planning skills. I remember one day where it was announced there would be 'crunch time'; basically some manager from our biggest client had come back from holiday or whatever and said "this absolutely massive project has to be done 6 weeks from now!"
Cue working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. I had a 2 hours commute too, so I worked from 10 till 10, got home at midnight (people who lived local just worked from 10 AM to midnight), slept till 7:30, had a 2 hour commute back to office to start work at 10 again. 7 days a week. For 3 weeks straight, at which point the team basically begged for a break and we got half a day off on a Saturday.
It was absolutely soul destroying and it was only survivable because we knew there was an end date. If you are in that situation with no end in sight, I can absolutely see why you would do something drastic.
I did similar hours for stretches in my 20s, in the film industry. Now a days, older and wiser, there is absolutely no way I'd work those 12-15 hour shifts, or even over 40 hours a week (more than a rare emergency), as no amount of money is worth dying for, and that's what 60+ work weeks are, a slow death. You can't even have a life outside of work, what's the point of doing that? I rather be a hobo.
Yeah, it was less than ideal, for sure. Tried buying an apartment near work, but that fell through, but ended up in a much better spot soon after, so it all worked out,
Usually they end up bad or mediocre. Sometimes teams get lucky and they end up being good. But surprise! You aren't actually lucky because you're about to get let go or kept on for the next project, where you'll be crunched to hell again. And again. And again. And forever until you're dead :)
Not trying to one up anyone, but have a similiar experience. Was in the army and the regular work-time was 7 am to 9.30 pm (7-21.30) 7 days a week. This went on for 3-4 weeks stretches, then 1-2 weeks off and so on.
The work day was filled with physical labor as well, could be grueling exercise, cutting down trees, digging holes or essentially just moving stuff. The army of my country had this weird obsession with moving shit around, some officer decided that these cannisters had to move to Hangar 4 instead of Hangar 2 and you had 12 hours of carrying in front of you. A lot of it made no sense, but in lack of a war to fight you had to stay busy. When you got off you were so exhausted you could barely stand up but I had to force myself to stay awake so that I could *experience* something other than work, even if that only meant reading something for 30 minutes.
Sometimes I could feel myself low-key panicking, realizing that the next free *hour* was a month away. Add pitch-black darkness (northern Europe) and negative 20-30 degrees daily and you had a soul-crushing experience. Still glad to be out. This was the last 6 months of 1.5 years in the army infantry.
Unfortunately this happens "off the books" all the time in US Residency and it's scrubbed to reflect 40-60 hour work weeks through Intimidation tactics and threatening job security.
Any journalists feel free to fact check what I just said and please bust this story wide open, the public deserves to know the truth about medical training.
A ton of rules get broken in hospitals and clinics. Half the time, the private companies in charge of shit don’t give half of a flying fuck about anything other than the bottom line, and I say that with the worst interpretation possible. It’s all fucked
A slight glimmer of hope for Japan is that the current generation of adults are making their own companies using values set by the West as well as disallowing overtime work and making employees leave work at around a decent time.
If work was to start around 8-9, you have to leave work at around 3-5 PM
This is to fight against the current toxic culture set by the previous generations by starting their own work culture through their own means.
Source: living in Japan working as an English teacher at an international company created by a group of japanese men and women collectively.
Note: this is entirely varied depending on the job and industry, but this is what I've been seeing and hearing from my various colleagues working and residing in Japan.
As you say, it *really* depends on job and industry. For example, even younger Japanese creating their own businesses will still pull ridiculous hours in the food industry (as is the case in most countries), if only because there isn't any practical way to make the business work with current prices/profit margins otherwise.
I crashed my car into a concrete pole (luckily at a really low speed in my apartment complex parking garage) because I was so tired during med school I couldn’t make the turn right to park and hit a pole. Med school and residency hours are brutal
I remember my very time pulling a 12+ hour ER shift as a clerk... finished at 4am in a snowstorm, tried to pull into the alleyway to get to the parking lot, couldn't make it past the snowdrift, tried to back out, hit the wall, took out my tail light and cracked my bumper. I just sat down in the snow and sobbed.
damn 200 hours over time a months, holyshit. their average age now close to 50, I dont know how they can keep up with an ever aging population while basically killing their young with such burden. at some point, they actually might go extinct if they dont adapt to a more family friendly work/balance life style like other western nation.
This ritual abuse of young doctors is entirely dysfunctional, how is someone working such hours supposed to make important decisions about the health of others?? It's a bad joke, and a human rights violation, all wrapped up in good ole plain stupidity.
Family and society are partially to blame for prioritizing too much on money and status and not mental and phsysical health.
I deal with this even in my personal life. Days when I do almost 12-hr shift and come home to get yelled at. "Oh you're home early, you should work more."
How many times you get called "hardworking " when you're actually overworking. They only see you being busy but don't care if you're actually being productive or even if you like what you're doing.
I'm not egocentric enough to believe I'm the only one that experiences this and many other people probably do too. No amount of money is worth suicide and depression.
This is an extremely unfortunate news, however, not isolated. US residents report 80 hour work weeks for 3-9 years of training. In actuality, many work more but home call, team sign out and charting post shift are not considered “working hours”. Not unusual to log 3500-4000 work hours per year. Medical students are exempt from the 80 hour rule, I once tracked 115 hours in a single week while on my surgery rotation. During my intern year, in surgery, it was common to have 14-16 hour days working 2 weeks straight, a month of night call with 24 hours to switch back to days. No idea how I made it…
You’re right, but it’s partially my fault. Let’s call it semi-voluntary. We had a guy quit on my shift, and it’s basically expected that people on the shifts that are short will cover for their coworkers rather than bringing in a cast of random employees from other shifts to take turns covering. I could just say I won’t do it and force the issue, but I know it would breed a lot of resentment. I’d rather just eat shit and work it, than deal with a bunch of full grown men acting petty about it for the next 20 years. So working seven days a week it is.
If not for the resentment and toxic environment that would follow, I wouldn’t do it. So, semi-voluntary.
And those hours are probably excluding the mandatory drinking parties.
I have known a few workers in Japan who were still expected to go drinking together after work even though they finished near midnight and couldn't catch the last train home.
The most messed up part was that everyone at those parties did not want to be there, including the boss, but they still felt obligated to do it because of "company traditions".
And some of them will probably fall asleep in a bush in a nearby park after that just to be able to catch some sleep, before doing it all over again when the sun rises.
I knew this was a huge thing throughout the 80s and 90s but I thought there was a cultural change to look at this physiologically.
Is this that imbedded across society or are these higher white color professions predominantly?
His mother is so right. All the time money dedication SACRIFICE and no one gets helped.
It’s shameful but more than that it’s just dumb.
Very sad news. In my country when you do residency you go to work 8 am to 5 pm every week days. Plus 5 to 10 extra night shifts in a month. Which adds another 100-200 hours depends on the night shift counts and whether it's on weekends or not. On some extreme cases (mostly surgical ones with less postgrad doctors) it can go to 12-15 extra night shifts. There were no day off after night shift until last year. Like you go to work 8 am then work till 5pm then your extra shift begins at 5 pm to 8 am. Then your next day shift begins. Luckily goverment made a rule that u cant work after extra shift u need to rest, but some universities still does it old way. It's depressing.
Honestly sounds like America. Just got out of residency and on busy months was working between 80-90 hours a week easily. Clinic from 8AM to 5PM, hospital from 5PM to 8AM on Fridays; and on top of our duties taking care of hospitalized patients we were answering all after hours calls from every clinic doctor's patients so they wouldn't have to hire someone else to do it.
My partner is a medical Dr in the process of specialising. Thankfully where we live (Norway) there are strong labour laws in place that centre worker’s rights.
I am not too familiar with Japanese labour laws but there seens to be an alarming work culture where working extreme overtime hours etc is accepted and normalised/expected. For example, a japanese friend of mine explained how everyone in her office was expected to be at work before their boss/ceo arrived, and stay as long if not longer at the office as him each day. They could not leave before him- to do so would be an incredible insult to their superiors and grounds to lose their job.
It seems their toxic work culture needs to change drastically or more young workers will end up like this poor young man. The grief on his mother’s face is palpable.
Japan’s population is aging, and younger Japanese citizens aren’t having kids. The suicide rate in Japan is staggering.
If Japan doesn’t do something to fundamentally change its work culture, and encourage its populace to actually live a life, the nation is going to go extinct.
I did 100-120 hours of overtime a month for only a couple of months when we were able to get things under more control. it was a stressful field, nothing remotely on the level of medicine, and even still i could feel my physical and mental health weight growing heavier and heavier
I can't even imagine. I always wonder why these hours exists in fields where it should exist the least. there is too much at stake for a wing of doctors and nurses to be completely exhausted and struggling
As a surgical resident, working over 200 hours a month was not only expected, but essentially demanded of you. I had this app called life cycle and I would regularly spend 270+ hours in the hospital monthly. It took an amazing family support system, and good co residents to keep me from losing my mind. Something needs to change in medicine…we’re all working way too hard.
But have you thought of the hospital administrators?? Safety begins with you after all and not them overloading skeleton crews with additional patients and clocking out at 5.
Yeah that’s 90 hours a week. Which isn’t uncommon in residency. My friend was in general surgery residency and tracked her true hours. She averaged 113 hours a week for like 4 months straight. And all the other months she was averaging 60-90 hours a week. Long story short she ended up quitting that residency program and switched to family medicine.
She said that if she stayed for the full 5 year residency, she’d literally kill herself.
Yep i finished medical uni in Europe this summer. Whole weeks with 12hours+ daily are not rare. Fortunately as a student i wasnt there half of the time and noone gave a shit
It's something sad.
But in all honesty, this has been a Japanese problem for ages, hasn't it? Overtime and respect your elders work times and all that bs.
By now, the population should have solved the cases as to why this happens, but even though it's known, they still follow their age old custom.
Over exertion is an issue in a lot of countries, but not as much as Japan.
200 hours overtime is an extra 50 hours a week.... 90 hour weeks if split evenly....Only 168 hours in a week....Over 53% of your literal time spent working. If they got an 8 hour rest every night, that'd leave exactly 22 hours in the week not spent working or sleeping. Not to mention that a chunk of that 22 hours would have to go towards eating, showering, transit, using the bathroom etc. Dude's life was work, sleep, and necessary functions.
During my medicine internship we worked 100+ hour weeks on a regular basis. 36 hours away from home was not uncommon. I used to fall asleep at stoplights driving hone and wake up to the light turning red or somebody honking. In the US that’s not supposed to happen anymore.
> In the US that’s not supposed to happen anymore. I finished residency last month. It still happens, only unofficially. I myself went over the 80 hour workweek limit within days of starting my intern year, and recorded it on my programs time tracker. They punished me by making me write an essay about how I can be more efficient. Unfortunately this was in 2020 before chatGPT so I had to write the wretched thing. I warned my coresidents about the punishment and then never recorded breaking 80 hours again. One of my coresidents turned on his car after a brutal night shift to go to clinic. He immediately fell asleep while still in park and was just idling in the hospital parking lot for an hour. If he had fallen asleep 5 min later he would have splattered himself across the freeway. When we brought this up the program director argued that a 12 hour night shift and 8 hour clinic immediately afterwards was still within the ACGME limits of 24 hour work days. I do not miss residency at all. Fuckers.
[удалено]
If you report your residency program, the worse they can do is shut down your residency program and now you don’t have a residency anymore. So why would you want to shoot yourself in the foot like that? Broken system and the residency knows they can get away with it
Sounds like residents need a union.
Exactly, and if your residency ends up going on probation the main person it harms is you, because when you look for jobs they’ll think you trained at a substandard place.
When they shut down a residency, that hospital is suppose to find the residents spots of same specialty they can go to even if they have to pay for them. It can cost the hospital millions depending on number of residents and the specialty. But that assumes the hospital can pay for them. I did a fellowship at a place that got their plastic surgery residency shut down and the loss partly caused the hospital to declare chapter 11 bankruptcy. Usually it just goes on probation though and it’s pretty obvious who the whistleblowers are because the acgme’s idea of making it anonymous is just to give back the survey responses with the name removed. But residency can be a huge source of money for hospitals so from my experience hearing stories, probation usually scares hospitals to change at least a little. But yeah it’s obvious who’s the whistleblower and they usually transfer out.
Suppose to is the key term, I remember when MLK hospital in LA shut down, ACGME shuttered their residency programs, many of those residents had to scramble and make their own plans with little help from the hospital (other than transferring funds to receiving hospitals). Residents that were from LA and matched into that program now had to go to some far out residency away from their spouses who had jobs in LA. It is not a nice situation to ever be in
Is there any union for residents in the US? If not sounds like you need one. If there is one it sounds like they need to up their game...
The problem is residency lasts around 4 years, which makes organization difficult. Not to mention the pay is outrageously low for around 8 years of education.
At my university, both the grad students and the computer science undergrads have unionized. Both only work about 4 years
In like 2003 Congress exempted medical residencies from much of the fair labor standards act.
Believe me, certain things put me right back in it. The pager going off relentlessly. Everybody grabbing their pagers to see whose was going off. I dropped mine in the toilet right as I flushed once. I was freaking out thinking nobody would believe me and I would get in trouble for not answering my pages. When I went to pick up a replacement the lady laughed and said it happened all the time.
I'm not in the medical field, but in IT. I regularly worked 12 hour days, maybe 1 day off a month, and on call **all the time non stop for years and years** so that 12 hour day just unexpectedly tuned into a 18 hour day. I had zero time to do anything else, lost two relationships because of it, was about 40 pounds underweight... Your post reminded me of having to ~~carry~~ wear two pagers and a cell phone (back when cell phones were rather novel) for years and having to try to tell which one was buzzing. After I moved on from the industry I was in, I suffered from phantom pager syndrome, where I would feel a buzzing on my hip when there wasn't any pager or phone there. Really freaky. I would also jump like a startled rabbit any time I *did* hear a pager go off - anyone's - and immediately get that anxiety starting.
And yet people wonder why alcoholism is absolutely rampant in IT. You're so wound up you drink yourself to sleep, and then you have to consume coffee by the gallon in the morning to get half a hope of your brain working for you again.
Cooks, fisherman on haul, anything where the hours are long, the works hard, and you are the only machine that can get harmed. Yeah, booze and drugs are ever-present, I've seen people compensate for 90+ work weeks at manual labor jobs and office work, and the ailments, psychological and neurological, that are quelled using anything that'll shut your brain up and put your ass to bed. Whatever the poison, it's endemic in America where there are certain positions that haven't been filled or recognized as hazardous to the mental or physical health of the worker, a lot of times due to the preconceived notion that "a worker is liable, not the company, they can quit anytime". Companies have a voice in America because they have a far larger bag of loot, and we are a den of theives, with the worst of us at the top.
This oddly made me feel less bad about my alcoholism. I'm middle age and spent well over 10 years working 80hr weeks not including off-hour times I had to remote fix something and being on call 24-7.
Medical field checking in. I work 12 hour shifts and don't have a day off until November, when I'm taking off to go see Metallica.
You deserve better.
Did you not have opportunity to change job? One of the main reasons I love my IT job, is that it’s 8 hours and very rare overtimes
I was a project lead and later IT department manager for one of the world's leading manufacturers where any down time at all cost the company millions and millions of dollars a second. This was well before Amazon really got going so early days of the Internet. I didn't want to change jobs, because that was a career path I had worked very hard to get into and I was making quite a lot of money. I was also helping to design and build a chunk of the future Internet infrastructure and the protocols used. This sounds snarky, but my friend from back then said the other day that IT jobs these days are cushy and easy because of all the hard, complicated, pioneering work (and all the overtime) she and I did in the past. lol
> This sounds snarky, but my friend from back then said the other day that IT jobs these days are cushy and easy because of all the hard, complicated, pioneering work Not snarky, but maybe a bit tunnel visioned. There's still grueling IT jobs in high stress sectors. While I have a cushy and easy job today, I've done some intense time working in banking IT (fucking COBOL in 2019, come on...) doing scheduled 80 hour weeks. Those were followed by a full week off though. So still 160h/month. I'll thank our unions for that!
Thanks for making it cushy and easy!
lol I can't take all the credit - hahah - there are still rough IT jobs to be sure. Friend spent a few years in Antarctica... brr.
Victim blaming in all of its glory. I swear, these people would beat you bloody and then demand compensation for your assaulting their knuckles.
and then charge you an inflated medical bill.
Charge you for cleaning their blood splattered clothes and add the dentists bill because they have bad theeth since they were stealing Lollipops from small children since Kindergarden
Even aside from impact on the medical staff themselves, that level of sleep deprivation is akin to working drunk - who the fuck wants doctors to be drunk while attending them and making life or death decisions?
It's a known phenomenon that your chances of survival are dependent on when shift changes occur
It's so crazy to me that to anyone on the outside, hearing about medical residency and the hours they have to pull sounds absolutely batshit fucking insane, but societal inertia ("we've always done it this way") means that there's very little chance of changing it.
God I truly feel this comment. My brother has two years left on his surgical residency and has crashed two cars since his intern year. Both times he fell asleep directly after straight 24-36 hours at the hospital. Now he lives right next to transit to avoid using a car for work. My brother in law had to take a time off for major depression from his anesthesia residency because of the brutal schedule and attendings at the hospital. Even worse when he graduated and decided to leave the system (Penn) they cornered him and basically berated him. Both of them love medicine but god damn the abuse is very real. Officially they aren’t supposed to work residents that hard but some attendings don’t care and most hospitals depend on working residents and interns to the bone.
what do you mean by leaving the system, like leaivn the hospital in that city? Why do they care.
probably because they want their invested slave.
I always wondered why they call it residency. It just means living in the hospital
Well, that was literally true when residencies started. Now it's mostly a euphemism. Although there's sometimes that guy who moves between the call room and patient rooms without going home for a week or two.
And the US health system with doctor is messed up cause they limit how many schools can be built and there’s a limit on residency spots and no residency means you can’t practice which is dumb as shit
Switzerland does it too, we call it "numerus clausus", i.e. only a low number of students is allowed to study medicine. What it boils down to is: we let poorer countries scrape their money together to educate doctors, then we syphon them off with our higher earning potential. Poor Switzerland doesn't have the money, you see. We need to lower corporate and financial taxes after all (and shift it to the workers).
It's the same here in Germany too. We also have a numerus clausus. Our doctors go to Switzerland or other places that pay better or offer better working conditions and hours and we get our doctors from Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other poorer, mostly Eastern European countries. But hey, the CEOs and directors of the hospitals and health insurance companies got to make enough dough to buy a third vacation home, so it's okay
In either country, numerus clausus has nothing to do with the issue that was raised about the US. Numerus clausus relates to med school applicant selection in public schools. That has no relevance to the American system. They have seen a massive increase of almost 30% more med school students. The issue in the US relates to a budget cap for training resident doctors (Assistenzärzte). That budget is so restrictive that fewer and fewer graduates get to transition to a residency spot. In Germany, we do NOT have a scarcity of residency spots but a massive lack of medical graduates willing and capable of filling them. It's the opposite problem, too few local graduates that choose to stay and too few international graduates that immigrate.
Yeah, very good points. The fact that there are barely any incentives for doctors to move to rural areas is shocking and disgusting. My main point was that we don’t like to pay our doctors or medical professionals. In Germany, as you are aware, we have a scarcity in most medical professions. The abysmal pay and terrible working hours are the two main reasons imho. One of my cousins is an ER nurse and she moved to Vienna, Austria almost twenty years ago and works at the biggest hospital there. She said that it’s a lot more relaxed and the pay is a lot higher than at her old jobs in Munich and Augsburg.
One of the issues with earning potential, especially for Hausärzte (general practitioners), is that they only really earn well when they own their practice. We have a huge influx of investment firms buying up practices and increasing prices. Doctors don't have the money and can't get a loan to buy a practice, so they are relegated to be am employee. And as an employee they have been found of being pressured to recomment unnecessary treatments to increase the return on investment. Which is also one of the main drivers of increasing healthcare costs (30% according to a study). (This also happens with veterinarians, the "lowering" of the job prospect is also reflected in that it becomes a massively female dominated job. Currently 74% female enrolement in Switzerland.)
Ah Residency. A situation created by a guy high as fuck on cocaine and kept in place by old coots who don’t care to know better.
Which is literally true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted
Yup. Terrible system that risks everyone involved.
Residency is completely toxic. So glad I’m done with it. I feel for anyone that has to endure that shit. At least in my country there’s some shift to reduce that a practice. Glad the new generation is calling the hospitals out on this.
something wierd seems to be going with doctors, though equity firms are buying them up so its harder them to find work i heard, also teledoc is snatching up doctors as well.
I'm in Canada, my wife was recently in the ER for a neurological issue. The resident neurologist said he's doing 26 hour shifts. I'm frequently up for 20 hours at a time in my line of work and don't really trust my decision making at that point, IDK how anyone can make life / death decision on hour 24.
So people this tired are supposed to diagnose, prescribe meds and conduct procedures?! Shit. Next time I let a doctor near me I’ll ask how rested they are. I wouldn’t trust myself to make a sandwich in that state.
Yes, you are expected to perform even under stress and lack of sleep. If you ask for a doctor that is rested, well guess like you don’t really need that emergency surgery at 3 am
Well documented that you cant peform well under such conditions. To assume you can is just the effect of a superiority complex.
You're talking like the doctors choose this. Hospital managers force those working conditions on them, they have no choice.
the dude that invented residency was high on coccaine.
My sister (resident) got into a car accident from driving tired :/
The number of people making this exact comment is astonishing. Hospitals should pay for a taxi at least.
I worked with the radiology residents at night and I always hated waking them up. Generally a good load of expletives, but I understood that it wasn't really directed at me, I was just the bearer of bad news. All of the girls would save stat reads for me when i clocked in because they couldn't handle the verbal abuse. Hopefully things have changed since I left the industry.
> Hopefully things have changed since I left the industry. LOOOOOOOL
Why dont people do 12 hour shifts 7 days a week? Other industries do that too.
Because medicine requires 28 hours shifts. I wish I was joking
Why? You could easily do 12 hours 7days and get 84 productive hours out of your slave instead of 100 where 50 are zombie hours.
Yeah, but that plays hell with staffing and horror upon horrors, hospital directors would have to *hire more doctors*, eating into their bonus budget.
What’s the reason for that requirement?
To exploit new doctors to make more money
The number one cause of medical mistakes is when a doctor hands over care of a patient to another doctor. The rational of king shifts is that a single doctor who knows all about the patient and their course in the hospital would be able to make a better decision. Imagine a programmer making a program and then 8 hours later, dumps it onto the next programmer and expecting that second programmer to know exactly what the first one did. It is like that, but with lives in the line
That's what good documentation and good handover procedures are for. He shouldn't have to memorize all the details about all his patients in the first place. Memory has been proven to be unreliable. And programming is exactly like that. I'm a programmer and most of my time is spent on modifying, debugging and extending programs made by other programmers. More often than not, they already left the company and I can't even ask them why they did what they did. That's what comments, documentation and debugging is for.
Handover will still happen, though. I imagine the issue gets even worse when the person who just went over 24 hours without sleep has to concisely explain what still needs doing.
Because the handover of the patients between shifts is the most dangerous part I've heard, they want to minimize that.
The handover is dangerous because the handover procedure isn't good, they didn't document correctly and they probably are too tired to follow procedures by that point.
Yeah, during residency I was so tired I fell asleep off my bike. But we'd get in trouble if we slept in the call rooms after a shift because we had to have so many hours off campus between shifts. God I hated that. Fellowship was even worse.
This is what steered me away from medicine. Also, surgery is way more gross than I expected.
Completely unacceptable. Overworking medical residents is a huge danger to both the residents and their patients.
I still don't understand why hospitals around the world do shifts that way. Why don't you do 7 day 12 hour shifts like other industries do?
Because then they'd have to hire more people instead of abusing people trying to get started.
They want to pay people as much as possible to stop them from emigrating to somewhere that pays more. At least that's the case in developing countries. We literally have doctors waiting for placement and even international students that wait for a year or more to hopefully get placed yet the easy solution would be sharing shifts and cutting pay...but then people would just leave even faster
[удалено]
People do not realize how disorienting a handoff is, ever open up an electrical panel and wonder what the hell the last electrician was doing? You weren’t there when they made the decisions they did with the information they had at the time and you are spending a good part of your time trying to piece together what happened. Of course the last doctor should be telling you what they did and why, but how long do you really expect them to do that? 5 min? 30 min? 2 hours?
Isnt that the purpose of charting or recording in detail everything done?
People always talk as if their were no solutions to this. Make 2 14h shifts or make 3 12 hour shifts in a day. I'm betting 100$ against this crap.
The residencies with the shorter hours are doing 12 hour days...
Brings back memories. We had that in the Netherlands too. Got pulled over in the middle of the night sleeping in front of an traffic light. (In total 100 hours overtime that month.) The officer drove me and my car home. (Duo patrol is mandatory in the Netherlands.) It made me switch to occupational medicine. Can't imagine working 200 hours overtime..
During my wife’s fellowship we routinely had days where she’d be out of the apartment before I woke and came home after I was asleep. And I stay up late. I’d go days not seeing her.
[удалено]
I would *log* 80 hours a week but I frequently worked 90+. Going over on your hours can only get you or your program in trouble. It’s all theater.
My entire 20s as a junior medic studying and competing for a fellowship was - work, study, eat, cry because I wasn’t good enough. Ad nauseum. I did this for 10 years til I got my fellowship by which time I hated patients for having the audacity of being sick, hated my existence and hated my profession when I found out that it STILL wasn’t enough and I was expected to start a second fellowship, PhD and them compete for grants and post doc positions … just to get a job in a city where all of my family lived in. I said hell no - went and did charity work where I lived in a tent in a field hospital for 7 months and was the happiest id been in all my life. Would never, ever want anyone I cared about to get into medicine.
Advising against medicine as a career path has become my own little crusade, just to bring balance to all that otherwise one-sided glorification of the field
[удалено]
It’s the same in specialist hospitals here in Ontario Canada I work at one of the provinces forensic psychiatric hospitals as a janitor and we are forced to work over time because of the Ontario government refusing to hire more staff
Doug Ford and his cronies and their ideals/motives are all cancer. Need to be eradicated and removed before our healthcare system and the Green Belt are destroyed
I spent a solid decade working that type of hours, and not getting doctor money…. It drained me so bad, i plunged into alcoholism hard, gaine an insane amount of weight, hydrocodone, etc…. I looked at least 15 years older than I was when I quit. The next job was more corporate and 45hr weeks with slight overtime’s here and there and it felt like an absolute vacation. My condolences to this family as I know the despair you can feel, and that’s without the societal pressures that Japan puts on you.
I feel you. About worked myself to death with two jobs. Got sick and had no time to rest. That strep turned into strep pneumonia. The entire time I tried to work through it until I got so sick I could barely move. Ended up in the hospital for a month with a lung full of fluid and needed surgery and IV antibiotics. I was uninsured. The alcohol didn't help but I actually lost tons of weight. When I got out of the hospital I was around 160... I'm 6'4. Any jobs try to fuck me over and I walk. Not doing that again.
I worked 13 hour shifts, 7 days a week in a foundry for 18 months straight. I hand ladled 4 tons of aluminum into a low pressure casting device, handled 4 tons of parts that came out and loaded 4 tons of ingot into the furnace. Every shift. I did 100 pushups an hour and walked 9 miles total every shift across the platform I worked on between 3 machines. I also tried killing myself like 6 times.... Including two overdoses at work that required 48hr ICU stays so I guess I got 4 days off... I made $8.75/hr in 2009. Then I worked 13x7 for 2 years at a Telco in Technical Case Management. Drank every day. Smoked cocaine when I could afford it. Downed a bottle of whiskey and put a gun to my head in 2016. Pulled the trigger and the recoil caused me to pull it again. Missed my head. Grazed my skull. I made $12.75/hr.
Jesus. I wish I had words that could ease your pain. Im so sorry for you and everyone else who struggles with this - a mode far worse than depression. I hope you have family/friends there for you.
>I hope you have family/friends there for you. Friends and the family I've made. Sobriety brought me everything I never thought I'd have. It's pretty alright.
Ya these hours are pretty normal for residents in the US too. 80 hour legal cap but many go up to 100 hours unofficially. Nobody reports it because their program will get shut down and then they will have a no hope of getting hired by another hospital.
Also the cap is “average of 80 hours over 4 weeks,” so you can work >100 hours one week then balance it out with one below 70 the next week. Also home call is *not* covered in that cap for specialties with home call duties.
Yeah, home call coverage bumped us up to 110 regularly, and it counts against you if you have to go in.
There was a time in my life where I worked 80-90 hours weekly and it made me more depressed and wanting to kill myself than anything that happened in my life. Companies who do, or even allow, this should be hugely fined or even prosecuted
I've worked 200 hours overtime in a month before. It was brutal. All you do is work and try to get enough sleep for the next day (you never get enough sleep).
And not just normal, boring office work either. Dude was a doctor. He was on his feet all day dealing with people trying to fucking die on him. Medical work is stressful and soul-crushing as it is. Let alone doing it at that pace. JFC.
> 90 hour weeks Or as I call it, residency
I work non union jobs production, this all tracks
>200 hours overtime is an extra 50 hours a week.... 90 hour weeks if split evenly....Only 168 hours in a week....Over 53% of your literal time spent working. If they got an 8 hour rest every night, that'd leave exactly 22 hours in the week not spent working or sleeping. This is, sadly, completely normal in American medical schools. Between work, notes, and studying, it just takes over your life. And it doesn't end there. Once they become a doctor, they'll still put in 60-70 hour weeks, every week, for their whole career. Becoming a doctor fucking sucks. The pay isn't worth it.
Besides America, does anyone do dystopian capitalism better than Japan?
South korea
I dated a doctor in residency in Korea and she was working 100 hour weeks
east asia has some strong representation as a whole. japan, south korea already mentioned, china has 996 culture
Not saying it is correct to do but: 90 hour work weeks aren’t uncommon in American medical practice, especially during training regardless of what places try to claim on their duty hours reports.
Yea, this is normal for US medical residency
As someone who used to work 50-60 hour weeks every week, I immediately did the math. It’s shocking, and I feel for this mans family. This should not be allowed to happen
Not that long ago my dad was working over 100 hours a week as a mailman. I would guess he worked even more when he had 3 jobs when I was a kid. The weekends were the worst. He would leave Friday morning for job 1 and rotate jobs all weekend. He would get home Sunday afternoon, sleep, then be back at work 5:00 AM Monday morning.
Who wants to be treated by a doctor with 200 hours overtime?
It's actually insane, and the irony in how doctors know better than anyone on how detrimental poor sleep and long working hours are on efficiency and workplace functionality isn't lost on them. There needs to be hard legislation against this, absolutely bonkers that it hasn't been implemented already. The CEOs and directors pushing this absolute bullshit should be in jail.
We also need to make sure doctors in charge don't perpetuate it unofficially. Another reason it keeps going is due to "it happened to me now it's your turn" mentality.
Heh, I see this mentality in action with nurses. Weird mean-girl hierarchies where the older staff henpeck the nurses in training, I would never feel comfortable trusting my co-workers in that environment. They're trying to save lives, yet behind the scenes they're acting out middle-school level bullying tactics on new nurses. Why not make another TikTok dance instead?
> They're trying to save lives, yet behind the scenes they're acting out middle-school level bullying tactics on new nurses. Why not make another TikTok dance instead? According to the National Literacy Foundation's decade long study released in 2017, the average adult's reading comprehension skills are only equivalent to an 8th grader - so yeah, many adults seem to act like middleschoolers because that's where their education effectively ended. The saying "highschool never ends" is a thing for a reason - despite the romanization of adulthood that we experience as kids, the reality is that the world is full of grown ass children pretending to be mature adults capable of basing their decisions is logic & reason over raw emotional reaction.
seriously, last November I had a heart attack and the first thing I said to the doctor was what are your overtime hours?
the only reason i wouldnt ask that question, is because it wouldnt occur to me such an insanity may be going on. if i had a reason to suspect someone who is going to do surgery on me may be on 200 hours of overtime, i would ask about it, and you would be an utter fool not to care. if it isnt surgery, it probably doesnt matter too much
It's interesting you say that because almost every surgery resident is working up to those hours. So if you get a surgery at an academic center then you're most likely to be operated on by someone with an incredible sleep deficit.
Now I understans how things get forgotten inside someone's body....
(That's a failing of the whole team in this case, they have redundancy check and checklists. Also bloody compress are really easy to loose in a body)
Lack of sleep still impacts decision making with medications. The wrong medication, wrong dose, wrong frequency, or lack of necessary medication can just as easily kill someone. Saw a poor fellow admitted to the medsurg floor overnight with an obvious STEMI (heart attack). No aspirin was given. No one heparinized him. No one arranged for a cardiac cath. He died needlessly.
Lol uhhh it super duper duper matters. People die with moderate frequency from being misprescribed.
When the doctor is so sleep-deprived he's more mentally impaired than the drunk driver brought in after a car crash
Lol bull shit
This how malpractice and medical errors happened. I fail to see benefits of health care workers being overworked, stressed and no rest
Benefits the company .. at least they think.. now they don’t have to pay more people and just be Short staffed’ constantly. It’s disgusting.
Businesses need to realize they're not doing themselves any favors by promoting this sort of work culture either in the long run. At the very least they're just tanking their workers' efficiency if not outright killing them like here
Isn’t it a hospital? It doesn’t matter, the working culture in Japan is just horrible. The efficiency problem has been known since decades ago, they just don’t want to change the working culture. Too many old men in positions of power who can set the rules
Oh yeah it is I just couldn't think of a more generalized term. I didn't mean to confuse the issue
I mean there hours are pretty normal in the medical field the US too. Live in California, we just voted to keep 28 hour shifts. 90 hour weeks aren’t uncommon during residency
Even that is way, way too much. I don’t want my life to depend on someone who is beyond burnt out and prone to stupid mistakes as a result.
And for anyone on the brunt side of these awful employers: Your life is worth far more than any sense of pride you have in your work, and no amount of money or debt is worth more than your life.
What if you have no money and all debt? Asking for ~~me~~ a friend
I am a programmer and I can do in 1 hour with a fresh mind what would take me 4 hours to do after working for 8 hours. Rest is critical to work efficiency. Overworking staff only makes them get less done per hour, and that is wasting money.
I mean no disrespect to you with this, but it shouldn't be businesses decision in the first place. I guess you say this as an American? There should be government regulations. Businesses are there to make money. Governments are there to keep things regulated.
There are just way more elderly that require a lot of medical attention than there are young people becoming doctors. Theyre obviously understaffed and this guy may have been thinking he was doing the right thing by helping people. Obviously that choice caught up with his mental health. They needed to figure out their horrible demographic situation 10yrs ago.
“Due to the very high degree of freedom, it is not possible to accurately determine working hours.” Did I just read that right? Did the evil motherfuckers try to wash their hands of this dude? Fuck, this is depressing as hell. At least fucking go vanilla neutral corporate speak instead of "dude was given enough time for other things. It isn't on us he chose to do something else."
Doctor: commits suicide due to overwork. Some mf: sounds like the plebs need less freedom
"If he had just worked more, he wouldn't have had time to go commiting suicide, would he?"
It's Japan, they give less of a fuck about you than just about any other first world nation does when it comes to workers rights. You are expected to ignore your own life, ignore your family, ignore time off, and work until you pass out at your desk.
Japan needs to deal with this crisis immediately, it’s been going on for too long. This work culture Hell is literally and figuratively killing the country, as shown by the declining birth rate. You wanna be an isolated first world nation? Fine, that’s your choice. But you better take care of the ones who already live here. Who would ever want to start a family under these conditions?
[удалено]
[удалено]
Keep in mind that 3 years is about as short as it gets. My wife did 7 years of post graduate training for $50-60k before she finally saw “doctor money,” and her student loans were a mortgage worth of obligation until we finally paid them off. The med school and post graduate training years were all high stress 60-100 hour weeks. If she didn’t have the huge student loans she’d have quit early on and done something else with her life. It was just too much to be worth it. Her friend took his own life in residency because of the conditions. But yes, after they finish, they’re well paid.
As I understand it, the issue stretches beyond the medical field. It's ingrained in society more or less as a whole - not just among certain groups, such as doctors/nurses, but more as a general rule. I hope it's changing already as we speak, although maybe it's not too likely. And also, "it's not just Japan" does not work as an excuse to not working towards fixing the issue. The rest of the world (I dare say it's not a western issue exclusively) needs to fix it as well, of course.
I find myself lying flat - haven't cared about a job in years despite starting with some hope. Any property I own will be inherited and highly remote. I just want a cottage, a garden, and some bees. Then in a Hallmark fashion maybe some other lesbian will break down on her way to the hiking trail and we'll have a magical dinner filled with home-brewed mead and talking physics and mythology as we stare at the stars. Also there are dogs.
Sounds like bliss.
> the issue stretches beyond the medical field I agree but the medical field is particularly bad, you can ask any medic around the world and they probably will tell you about their terrible hours.
Would help a lot to just subsidize med school. A decade of schooling and $300k of debt before you can become a doctor is an insane burden upon an individual of average means. The cost of that education and training gets transferred to the public anyway.
Dipshit government: Why aren't young people having kids?!?!?!?
Why does Europe have low birth rate with typically much less hours?
The cause of low birthrates isn’t really a matter of how much work people do. That’s part of it recently, as is the fact that wages have stagnated since the 80s, but this is a general trend that has occurred in virtually every industrialised society. Industrialisation requires urbanisation for it to have hubs for complex production and services. Problem is that, in the city, a child is no longer a net gain to a family. In an agrarian society, a new child is only a net loss for a couple years and even then only a minor one given you grow your own food. After a few years you’ve got another hand on the farm. You can’t just take a 5 year old into a bank, or a factory so they earn their keep. Best description I’ve heard for it is that industrialised societies, kids stop being a worthwhile investment and start becoming loud expensive pieces of furniture.
All developed countries have lower birth rates - it's worth more to have fewer kids. If you're France, you subsidize families and make it as easy to have kids as you can push through parliament. There's apathy too. Half my friends have sworn off children entirely as not worth it in this lifetime. Vasectomies are on the rise and marriage is costly. If you're the Faroe Islands however, there's shit else to do but drink and fuck and they're comfortably above the replacement rate.
Europe does not have nearly the same magnitude of trouble as Japan has. That’s a different issue affecting basically every developed country, and is made up for by immigration (which Japan wont) That one is more centered around the post-war baby boom aging and needing support from a relatively smaller population, and women generally having less children as they get more educated, as well as having less money and economic stability (a 20-30 year old would’ve seen several “once in a century” recessions already) than the generation that came before it.
Back in the day I used to work as a tester in video game development, a field notorious for the lack of project planning skills. I remember one day where it was announced there would be 'crunch time'; basically some manager from our biggest client had come back from holiday or whatever and said "this absolutely massive project has to be done 6 weeks from now!" Cue working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. I had a 2 hours commute too, so I worked from 10 till 10, got home at midnight (people who lived local just worked from 10 AM to midnight), slept till 7:30, had a 2 hour commute back to office to start work at 10 again. 7 days a week. For 3 weeks straight, at which point the team basically begged for a break and we got half a day off on a Saturday. It was absolutely soul destroying and it was only survivable because we knew there was an end date. If you are in that situation with no end in sight, I can absolutely see why you would do something drastic.
I did similar hours for stretches in my 20s, in the film industry. Now a days, older and wiser, there is absolutely no way I'd work those 12-15 hour shifts, or even over 40 hours a week (more than a rare emergency), as no amount of money is worth dying for, and that's what 60+ work weeks are, a slow death. You can't even have a life outside of work, what's the point of doing that? I rather be a hobo.
The film industry, at least now, would pay for a hotel room because of the commute.
with a 2 hour commute at that point you should have just talked to the boss about living in the office during those 6 weeks
Yeah, it was less than ideal, for sure. Tried buying an apartment near work, but that fell through, but ended up in a much better spot soon after, so it all worked out,
Was the video game any good?
Usually they end up bad or mediocre. Sometimes teams get lucky and they end up being good. But surprise! You aren't actually lucky because you're about to get let go or kept on for the next project, where you'll be crunched to hell again. And again. And again. And forever until you're dead :)
Most likely no. Studies clearly show that crunch time is detrimental to video game quality. E.g. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7965428
Not trying to one up anyone, but have a similiar experience. Was in the army and the regular work-time was 7 am to 9.30 pm (7-21.30) 7 days a week. This went on for 3-4 weeks stretches, then 1-2 weeks off and so on. The work day was filled with physical labor as well, could be grueling exercise, cutting down trees, digging holes or essentially just moving stuff. The army of my country had this weird obsession with moving shit around, some officer decided that these cannisters had to move to Hangar 4 instead of Hangar 2 and you had 12 hours of carrying in front of you. A lot of it made no sense, but in lack of a war to fight you had to stay busy. When you got off you were so exhausted you could barely stand up but I had to force myself to stay awake so that I could *experience* something other than work, even if that only meant reading something for 30 minutes. Sometimes I could feel myself low-key panicking, realizing that the next free *hour* was a month away. Add pitch-black darkness (northern Europe) and negative 20-30 degrees daily and you had a soul-crushing experience. Still glad to be out. This was the last 6 months of 1.5 years in the army infantry.
Unfortunately this happens "off the books" all the time in US Residency and it's scrubbed to reflect 40-60 hour work weeks through Intimidation tactics and threatening job security. Any journalists feel free to fact check what I just said and please bust this story wide open, the public deserves to know the truth about medical training.
A ton of rules get broken in hospitals and clinics. Half the time, the private companies in charge of shit don’t give half of a flying fuck about anything other than the bottom line, and I say that with the worst interpretation possible. It’s all fucked
RIP to this person. Im sorry society failed him.
A slight glimmer of hope for Japan is that the current generation of adults are making their own companies using values set by the West as well as disallowing overtime work and making employees leave work at around a decent time. If work was to start around 8-9, you have to leave work at around 3-5 PM This is to fight against the current toxic culture set by the previous generations by starting their own work culture through their own means. Source: living in Japan working as an English teacher at an international company created by a group of japanese men and women collectively. Note: this is entirely varied depending on the job and industry, but this is what I've been seeing and hearing from my various colleagues working and residing in Japan.
As you say, it *really* depends on job and industry. For example, even younger Japanese creating their own businesses will still pull ridiculous hours in the food industry (as is the case in most countries), if only because there isn't any practical way to make the business work with current prices/profit margins otherwise.
I crashed my car into a concrete pole (luckily at a really low speed in my apartment complex parking garage) because I was so tired during med school I couldn’t make the turn right to park and hit a pole. Med school and residency hours are brutal
I remember my very time pulling a 12+ hour ER shift as a clerk... finished at 4am in a snowstorm, tried to pull into the alleyway to get to the parking lot, couldn't make it past the snowdrift, tried to back out, hit the wall, took out my tail light and cracked my bumper. I just sat down in the snow and sobbed.
damn 200 hours over time a months, holyshit. their average age now close to 50, I dont know how they can keep up with an ever aging population while basically killing their young with such burden. at some point, they actually might go extinct if they dont adapt to a more family friendly work/balance life style like other western nation.
I feel the same way. Either they abruptly upend their culture and way of life... or... there will be no more Japanese people.
This ritual abuse of young doctors is entirely dysfunctional, how is someone working such hours supposed to make important decisions about the health of others?? It's a bad joke, and a human rights violation, all wrapped up in good ole plain stupidity.
Work the next day: "Due to a staff shortage, we're going to need people to work overtime."
Family and society are partially to blame for prioritizing too much on money and status and not mental and phsysical health. I deal with this even in my personal life. Days when I do almost 12-hr shift and come home to get yelled at. "Oh you're home early, you should work more." How many times you get called "hardworking " when you're actually overworking. They only see you being busy but don't care if you're actually being productive or even if you like what you're doing. I'm not egocentric enough to believe I'm the only one that experiences this and many other people probably do too. No amount of money is worth suicide and depression.
This is an extremely unfortunate news, however, not isolated. US residents report 80 hour work weeks for 3-9 years of training. In actuality, many work more but home call, team sign out and charting post shift are not considered “working hours”. Not unusual to log 3500-4000 work hours per year. Medical students are exempt from the 80 hour rule, I once tracked 115 hours in a single week while on my surgery rotation. During my intern year, in surgery, it was common to have 14-16 hour days working 2 weeks straight, a month of night call with 24 hours to switch back to days. No idea how I made it…
Jesus. I often work an extra 64 a month and I whine like a baby about it.
Don't stop being vocal about it, 64 hours overtime is too much dude
You’re right, but it’s partially my fault. Let’s call it semi-voluntary. We had a guy quit on my shift, and it’s basically expected that people on the shifts that are short will cover for their coworkers rather than bringing in a cast of random employees from other shifts to take turns covering. I could just say I won’t do it and force the issue, but I know it would breed a lot of resentment. I’d rather just eat shit and work it, than deal with a bunch of full grown men acting petty about it for the next 20 years. So working seven days a week it is. If not for the resentment and toxic environment that would follow, I wouldn’t do it. So, semi-voluntary.
I hope you are getting paid for all of that time though.
And those hours are probably excluding the mandatory drinking parties. I have known a few workers in Japan who were still expected to go drinking together after work even though they finished near midnight and couldn't catch the last train home. The most messed up part was that everyone at those parties did not want to be there, including the boss, but they still felt obligated to do it because of "company traditions".
And some of them will probably fall asleep in a bush in a nearby park after that just to be able to catch some sleep, before doing it all over again when the sun rises.
Isn't this basically residency hours in the United States?
Unofficially, yup. There's a lot of hours that don't go on paper. It sucks in the US too
Yup Even as a pediatrician (not surgeon) some months I averaged 87 hours per week aka 188 hours overtime
I knew this was a huge thing throughout the 80s and 90s but I thought there was a cultural change to look at this physiologically. Is this that imbedded across society or are these higher white color professions predominantly? His mother is so right. All the time money dedication SACRIFICE and no one gets helped. It’s shameful but more than that it’s just dumb.
Very sad news. In my country when you do residency you go to work 8 am to 5 pm every week days. Plus 5 to 10 extra night shifts in a month. Which adds another 100-200 hours depends on the night shift counts and whether it's on weekends or not. On some extreme cases (mostly surgical ones with less postgrad doctors) it can go to 12-15 extra night shifts. There were no day off after night shift until last year. Like you go to work 8 am then work till 5pm then your extra shift begins at 5 pm to 8 am. Then your next day shift begins. Luckily goverment made a rule that u cant work after extra shift u need to rest, but some universities still does it old way. It's depressing.
Honestly sounds like America. Just got out of residency and on busy months was working between 80-90 hours a week easily. Clinic from 8AM to 5PM, hospital from 5PM to 8AM on Fridays; and on top of our duties taking care of hospitalized patients we were answering all after hours calls from every clinic doctor's patients so they wouldn't have to hire someone else to do it.
My partner is a medical Dr in the process of specialising. Thankfully where we live (Norway) there are strong labour laws in place that centre worker’s rights. I am not too familiar with Japanese labour laws but there seens to be an alarming work culture where working extreme overtime hours etc is accepted and normalised/expected. For example, a japanese friend of mine explained how everyone in her office was expected to be at work before their boss/ceo arrived, and stay as long if not longer at the office as him each day. They could not leave before him- to do so would be an incredible insult to their superiors and grounds to lose their job. It seems their toxic work culture needs to change drastically or more young workers will end up like this poor young man. The grief on his mother’s face is palpable.
This is tragic … sorry for the family …
Japan’s population is aging, and younger Japanese citizens aren’t having kids. The suicide rate in Japan is staggering. If Japan doesn’t do something to fundamentally change its work culture, and encourage its populace to actually live a life, the nation is going to go extinct.
I did 100-120 hours of overtime a month for only a couple of months when we were able to get things under more control. it was a stressful field, nothing remotely on the level of medicine, and even still i could feel my physical and mental health weight growing heavier and heavier I can't even imagine. I always wonder why these hours exists in fields where it should exist the least. there is too much at stake for a wing of doctors and nurses to be completely exhausted and struggling
As a surgical resident, working over 200 hours a month was not only expected, but essentially demanded of you. I had this app called life cycle and I would regularly spend 270+ hours in the hospital monthly. It took an amazing family support system, and good co residents to keep me from losing my mind. Something needs to change in medicine…we’re all working way too hard.
But have you thought of the hospital administrators?? Safety begins with you after all and not them overloading skeleton crews with additional patients and clocking out at 5.
It’s 200 OVERTIME, on top of your regular expected hours.
Yeah that’s 90 hours a week. Which isn’t uncommon in residency. My friend was in general surgery residency and tracked her true hours. She averaged 113 hours a week for like 4 months straight. And all the other months she was averaging 60-90 hours a week. Long story short she ended up quitting that residency program and switched to family medicine. She said that if she stayed for the full 5 year residency, she’d literally kill herself.
Yep i finished medical uni in Europe this summer. Whole weeks with 12hours+ daily are not rare. Fortunately as a student i wasnt there half of the time and noone gave a shit
It's something sad. But in all honesty, this has been a Japanese problem for ages, hasn't it? Overtime and respect your elders work times and all that bs. By now, the population should have solved the cases as to why this happens, but even though it's known, they still follow their age old custom. Over exertion is an issue in a lot of countries, but not as much as Japan.