A flexible duty hour schedule that kept total weekly hours under 80 but allowed for longer shift length and no fixed mandatory time off between shifts was not inferior to the current standard duty hour regulations when it came to sleep duration or morning alertness.

Don’t miss this HEART score rendition of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Happy Holidays!

Wearing a parachute vs an empty backpack had no impact on mortality or injury severity in select jumpers from an airplane. Use caution when extrapolating this to higher altitude jumps, i.e. those over 2 feet.

EMS providers had 39% greater odds of death by suicide than the general population in this Arizona-based sample. This problem is real. Reach out if you need help. See below.

Scribes increased physician productivity in this single center low-acuity pediatric ED before and after study.

With ED boarding, the burden of sign-out patients is greater than ever. This study shows just what I expected.  All of these sign-out patients negatively affects how many new cases each resident is able to see on each shift.

There was no patient safety benefit to having attending internal medicine physicians physically join rounds on established (not new) inpatients.  My application of this to the ED is to make sure I give our residents enough autonomy to learn.

I recently read an article entitled The Mid-Career Demon.  Finding myself in mid-career, and with such a provocative title, my curiosity was piqued.  The concept of acedia, the “mid-career demon,” intrigued me.  I had felt this way too. Here is how I am making it through mid-career.

Internal Medicine interns and residents were either exposed to standard duty-hour policies of the 2011 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) or flexible policies that did not specify limits on shift length or mandatory time off between shifts. Read more to see what they found.

Burnout is a huge problem among physicians, especially those of us in the ED.  I have been through it and still battle that feeling from time to time.  I don't have any simple answers.  But I do have five fun, simple things you can do to take your mind off work and give you a respite.