Doctors so tired they 'fall asleep at wheel'

Published on Thursday 22 March 2007 00:08

MANY junior doctors make mistakes due to tiredness even when working schedules designed to give them plenty of rest, according to new research.

A study found that two-thirds of doctors had made an error at some point in their careers due to exhaustion and 42 per cent had done so in the preceding six months.

At the time of the study, the doctors were working 40 or more hours a week on schedules designed to cut weekly working hours, give adequate rest breaks and reduce the risk of errors.

But the authors, writing in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, said cutting junior doctors' hours and giving them more rest breaks would not, by itself, reduce tiredness or errors.

The researchers questioned 1,366 junior doctors on work patterns, sleepiness and errors related to tiredness through an anonymous questionnaire.

A quarter (24 per cent) of doctors said that since the start of their career, they had fallen asleep at the wheel of their car while driving home.

Two-thirds (66 per cent) said they had come close to falling asleep at the wheel in the previous year, and one in five said it had happened on at least five occasions.

Each doctor was given a "fatigue risk score" by combining ten different aspects of their work and sleep, such as access to rest and support, in the preceding week.

Almost 30 per cent of them were ranked as "excessively sleepy", and researchers found that they were all twice as likely to be "excessively sleepy" as the general population.

The higher a doctor's fatigue risk score, the higher the chance that they had fallen asleep while driving or made a mistake in the past six months.

According to the European Working Time Directive, UK junior doctors should work no more than 58 hours a week.