Medical Interns: Are They Sleep Deprived

If you've spent any amount of time in a hospital or emergency room, you know how hard the nurses, doctors and interns work. But do you know how little sleep they are getting? If you or a relative are in an accident and are rushed into the Emergency room, are you going to feel comfortable knowing the intern who's taking care of you has only had a few hours of sleep in the past 24 hours?

Are you going to wonder if the complications your loved one had was somehow due to how exhausted the doctor was? Lack of sleep can also cause lack of judgment, health problems, concentration difficulties, as well as mood changes and hallucinations.

Some people think they don't need much sleep in order to make it through each day, but the fact is everyone needs sleep in order to function properly. Sleep is actually needed in order to regenerate the brain, without sleep the brain will not function as well as it could. After long hours of being awake neurons in the brain begin to malfunction and this will affect a persons behavior.

A person who is sleep deprived will not be as fast to act as someone who is rested, they will not have the reasoning to make logical decisions or be able to focus on several different problems at the same time and be able to make good decisions for solving the problems that they are confronted with. Sleeplessness impairs judgment, mood, motor coordination, reaction time, reasoning skills and the ability to recognize mistakes.

Health problems often occur when a person is sleep deprived, this is because the immune system is weakened without sleep. Sleep deprived animals die, sleep is as essential for living beings as is food.

Knowing that people with lack of sleep can have these problems, are we really safe when we go to the hospital and put our lives in the hands of someone who maybe hasn't had any sleep in the past three days?

Why do hospital administrations feel it necessary to make interns work such long hours with little to no sleep, when they themselves may be writing or reading about how bad it is to be sleep deprived? Being in the medical field they have to know how bad it is, so why is it still a practice to make doctors, interns and nurses stay awake working around sick patients, emergencies and stressful situations when one wrong move could mean the difference between life and death?