Sleep Deprivation and Performance of Residents

Abstract

To the Editor. — The study by Deaconson et al 1 entitled Sleep Deprivation and Resident Performance in the September 23/30 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association fails to prove its point. They studied surgical residents on an every-other-night oncall schedule, comparing their performance after a night on call with that after a night off call, and, finding no difference in performance, concluded that such call schedules do not impair the performance of residents on psychometric tests and, by implication, performance in the provision of patient care. Such a conclusion simply cannot be made from their data. There is no basis for their assumption that recovery can be expected after a single night's sleep. I recall my own residency in internal medicine, when I was on call every third night. The day after a sleepless night on call, I was able to, as Kollar et al 2