General medicine interns work too much. Here are the conclusions of an ISNAR-IMG report released on Friday 15 February.
Eighty hours a week. This is the time that 4% of general medicine interns would spend in the hospital, according to a survey by the union of general medicine interns ISNAR-IMG presented this Friday at the 20th Congress of Tours. A period well above the legal limit set by the European Commission which requires medical students not to work more than 48 hours per week in ten half-days.
Conducted among 1,000 interns during the second half of 2018, the ISNAR-IMG survey shows that this limit is not respected since one in two students exceeds this working time.
“Service Duties”
This is especially true in hospitals, where 84% of respondents explain working longer hours for “service obligations”. “The overload of work in the hospital and the pressure of senior doctors is a reality”, underlines the study. By way of comparison, medical students who do their internship in private practices work very little overtime since 85% of them believe that working hours are respected.
These data are to be taken seriously since in 2017, another ISNAR-IMG survey revealed that one in four intern suffers from burnout and harbors suicidal thoughts.
Risk of burnout
“The interns are, above all, professionals in training and they cannot just be an adjustment variable in the event of a shortage of medical personnel”, considers Lucie Garcin, president of ISNAR-IMG.
Early January, a study carried out by one of the researchers from the Hospitals of Marseille comprising 15,000 French doctors revealed that nearly 60% of emergency physicians (57%) and more than half of young doctors (52%) suffer from at least one symptom characterizing burnout in France.
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