Lifting duty-hour restrictions for medical residents would make the field an inhospitable place for physicians with children, reports The Atlantic.
The first piece of advice I received about managing family life alongside a medical career: “Marry a cactus.”
It was my first year of medical school; the speaker was a surgeon on a panel the school had organized for new students to discuss work-life balance in medicine. My husband, I figured, could survive pretty well without watering. But then I glanced down at my pregnant belly: The baby, I thought, was not going to be a cactus.
Fortunately for me, policies enacted years before my time made it easier for me to juggle being both a doctor and a mother. In 2003, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) enacted the first nationwide restrictions on duty hours for medical residents. In 2011, they were updated to their current form: workweeks capped at 80 hours, with a mandatory eight hours of rest between shifts.
