How to Make the Most of the Hours We Have Left

Experience matters. As Albert Einstein, Julius Caesar, and many other philosophers and wise men have said, experience is the one proven way to gain knowledge. Because experience matters so much, our profession must make every effort to make sure that each of us attains the experience necessary to best serve our patients. But these efforts are made more difficult because our hours in surgery have dropped: our residents’ hours have been limited to 80 per week since 2003, and as the fees for services paid to our licensed physicians have decreased, their hours worked have fallen to just 49 per week in metropolitan areas and 52 hours per week elsewhere, as Staiger et al1,2have shown. This reduction in hours poses a direct challenge to our profession’s duty to ensure that every doctor has the proper amount of experience. In this article, I will address that challenge.