Nowadays there are shortage of both nurses and doctors and this has been noted by various organizations including American Medical Association and the National Nurses Association to have even expanded to irreversible level. But it had been constantly projected that the numbers will never stay on that kind of slope and will somehow, with great positivity, increase in the coming years as many nursing schools and the immigration system of the country will be producing nurses in hospital uniforms. And it is also noted that many Americans are shifting from clerical office to work as nurses in hospitals. Not to mention the job that the new health care bill passed by Congress can make as the law can draw millions of Americans back to their most desired health care services.
From the news about the declining numbers of nurses, there is another study that has been published through CNN Online about doctors. This time these professionals in medical scrubs are again on the hot seat but not because of its population but because of some issues concerning their effectiveness during duty. The study does not aim at criticizing the doctors’ skill in terms of the medical procedures that they perform or their aptitude in terms of the vast knowledge they learned and are putting into practice but on the grounds that there are certain things that supposedly interrupts in their line of works.
Based from the same research, it showed that doctors it showed that doctors on duty are being interrupted in so many ways and most of the time. Such disruptions the study summarizes can affect how the doctors perform their duties and somehow had affected the way and the time they have given to their patients.
From the conducted research by University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales about the behavior of the doctors in a particular emergency department and they found out staggering results. They have observed on 40 doctors in a 400-bed capacity emergency ward for over 210 hours and studied the relevant time and their motions. The study showed that every doctor is interrupted in so many ways about 7 times per hour. And that if there are 10 tasks 1.1 of them is interrupted 3.3% of the doctors studied are interrupted more than once. The study that was published in a journal named Quality and Safety in Health Care expound that 18.5% of those interrupted tasks where not returned on by doctors.
"It appears that in busy interrupt-driven clinical environments, clinicians reduce the time they spend on clinical tasks if they experience interruptions, and may delay or fail to return to a significant portion of interrupted tasks," assessed by the authors headed by Johanna Westbrook as told to CNN.
The bewildering effects of the result of the study are somehow directed not on the doctors but on the patient as time spent on each patient is very important to arrive at a decision that can either help the patient survive or not. Though the study did not mention the specific interruptions doctors encounter it is enough to know that somehow the medical field must be reformed somehow.
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