Duty hours for pharmacy residents

Abstract

Pharmacy residency programs are subject to the duty-hour standards of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), and those standards have been revised for 2011.1,2 However, the ASHP Commission on Credentialing (COC) will issue pharmacy residency programs a waiver from the 2011 ACGME standards until July 2013, and the COC will develop standards for pharmacy-specific duty hours to be implemented by July 2013. Until that time, pharmacy residency programs will remain accountable to the current 2007 ACGME duty-hour standards. We applaud the COC for its decision to allow programs to follow current standards in the interim. Evidence of the effects of sleep deprivation and fatigue on medical errors and performance led to more humanistic policies on the maximum weekly duty hours for medical residents and mandatory time for those residents to be free of duty. We agree that the environment should support learning and safe practice and that measures should be taken to attenuate the effects of sleep deprivation and fatigue, and we design our pharmacy residency programs to comply with ACGME guidelines.3 However, pharmacy training programs are only included in the general context of other residency programs within the ACGME guidelines. We maintain that pharmacy residents cannot be summarily included with other medical specialties when considering implementation of these standards, particularly within the context of training.