A main objective of restricting working time for residents, whether it is the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) regulation or the European Working Time Directive (EWTD), is to protect patients from exhausted doctors. However, in the Netherlands, legislation enacted in 1993 to reduce working hours for junior doctors, as residents are termed, and midwives was prompted by trainees in a teaching hospital who complained to members of parliament about long working hours and miserable personal lives. At the time, public working hours were mandated to no more than 38 h/wk. An arbitrary 10 hours was added for education and training: thus, trainees were allowed to work 48 hours a week. In the first years, the Dutch Department of Labor took a more or less lenient position but, in 1997, started to enforce the law. Site visits to hospitals are made routinely, resident schedules are inspected, and hospitals are fined if they do not comply with the rules. Initially the surgical community fiercely opposed the new regulation and argued that a work week of 48 hours would not suffice to adequately train young surgeons. However, their plea for a 60-hour work week was politically unacceptable to the Dutch government, which had already accepted the limits of the European Working Time Directive. In 1995, the yearly survey of the Dutch Association of Surgical Trainees reported a work week of 57 hours. This number decreased to 55 hours in 2005 and has remained unchanged since.1