Pondering EM - 25/01/2015 - By Robert Lloyd
"The Emergency Department is usually the only part of the hospital that has multiple doctors and nurses working at full speed 24 hours/day. A night shift as an ED registrar rarely allows for a wink of sleep, and we are constantly chopping and changing between day and evening shifts when not on night duty, punishing our bodies. Finishing work on time is essential to maintain any routine (and sanity!) in your life as an ED doctor.
Therefore, we buy into the shiftwork mentality – it is the clock that dictates when we leave work, not how long our list of patients is.
Despite the transiency of patients in the ED, (most go home, and those that are admitted usually get rushed upstairs so that the ‘4-hour target’ is adhered to -certainly in the UK, increasingly so in Australia) a consequence of shiftwork culture in the ED is that an undeniably large part of our job is ‘handover’."
http://www.ponderingem.com/2015/01/pondering-em-journal-club-changes-in.html