Midnight oil

“It’s 2019, it’s Australia, and currently we live in a country where not only do we not manage fatigue in medicine, but we brazenly refuse to acknowledge that fatigue even presents a risk to ourselves and our patients.

Every time a doctor talks about fatigue, we share our collective “thoughts and prayers” on social media, we bemoan the fact that the system isn’t better and we get back to business as usual. I’d argue that it starts with us. When doctors are falling asleep on the flight deck, the correct next step is not to refer the next patient. It’s to recognise the true emergency here: that this doctor is too fatigued to provide safe and effective care to themselves or their patients, and they need time to recover.”