Hospital doctors don’t have time to eat or sleep properly, and often feel as if they must be in several places at once, it shows in a new survey.
‘It’s an expression of a fairly large under-staffing problem,’ said Christer Mjåset,leader of the Yngre legers forening (Ylf), to Klassekampen newspaper.
Ylf are behind the survey concerning the workload of hospital doctors, and 3,000
members from all over the country have responded. Mjåset isn’t surprised by the figures from the survey, and describes the situation as ‘a disclaimer from the employer’.
45% said they don’t have enough time to eat, and according to the newspaper, they don’t even talk about food breaks, but just to get time to chew bread. 14.5% responded that they feel either to a small or very small extent that they can take the time to go to bed when they need it. For those who answered ‘to some degree,’ the figure was 45%.
41% said that there isn’t enough rest time after a duty shift, and that they don’t feel rested when they go to work again, and almost 9% said they have experienced
involuntary sleep on duty.
‘The situation extends beyond the young doctors without permanent posts, who must
take more patients, work overtime and not get paid for it. It’s a short-term strategy for
hospitals to keep to budgets. That one in ten fall asleep involuntarily on duty is quite
high. We are going to take a step forward’, said Mjåset.
© NTB Scanpix / Norway Today
