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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

> They also found that some surgeons did not work on their birthdays

Is this partially that better/more experienced/senior/more affluent doctors are taking their birthday off, hence people getting more junior doctors?

It would be interesting to see how many more people die on a particular surgeons birthday compared with the rest of their year, rather than the birthday of the surgeon a patient gets.

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Those that are working on their birthday also more likely to do so under emergency situations...

Are they? Sounds odd that the norm would be for people to take birthdays off.

I may be making this up, but aren't there some rather strict rules about surgeons and alcohol? It may make them more likely to just take the day off.

I'd guess that few surgeons start boozing at breakfast on their birthday or have a lunchtime drinking session to celebrate. But are more likely to be rushing off to have a party than actually be impaired.

I more thought you might need to request the day off to avoid being on call, surgeons have very unstable hours.

It doesn't have to be norm, only statistically significant.

The study controls for surgeon factors, so this is taken care of.

I remember a previous study showing that junior doctors were actually associated with better results since they were more recently trained and had less ingrained habits/biases.

Don't know if it applied to surgery though.

I suppose what you want is someone with enough experience, but who hasn't been out of medical school for too long. Probably 7-10 years of experience would be the sweet spot.

I wonder if this applies to other domains as well.

Sounds like you're remembering the heart attack during cardiology conferences study? https://media.jamanetwork.com/news-item/patient-outcomes-whe...

Most critical cases (with higher chance of death) would probably be given to more senior, experienced surgeons, and that skews the statistics.

I would be surprised if it did. I believe the reduction in doctors’ overtime was a wash for parent safety as more shift handoffs and less sleep deprivation more or less canceled except in surgery where it increased mistakes.

Those studies are silly though—-the “reduced” schedule is often still something like 24 hours on-duty (vs 28).

Hand-off is also something that could, in principle, be improved whereas long shifts are just butting up against the limits of human physiology.

Those should be removed from the study.

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