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In This Issue:
Last year, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) approved new requirements that limit residents to 80 duty hours per week. These requirements will be mandated nationwide as of July 1. The resulting reduction of hours has the potential to impact the continuum of care and the responsibilities among members of any given patient care team at BWH—changes that BWH is well-prepared to handle.
As residents’ hours will be cut significantly, plans are almost finalized at BWH to deal with the upcoming transition coinciding with the July 1 arrival of the 2003 newly matched residents.
“As a way to keep the patient continuum of care consistent and to ensure patient safety over time, BWH has come up with a plan to ‘back-fill’ those responsibilities, tasks, and workload that would traditionally be handled by residents,” said Chief Medical Officer Anthony Whittemore, MD.
According to Whittemore, an incremental addition of full-time employees will take place. As a result, a combination of nurse practitioners (NP) and physician assistants (PA) will be added to the staff of the areas that are predicted to be most affected by the upcoming ACGME requirements.
Plans include adding one NP or PA to the Emergency Department; four to the Bone Marrow Transplantation (BMT) Service; three to Cardiothoracic Surgery; two to General Surgery; one to Neurology; two to Neurosurgery; one to Obstetrics and Gynecology; and two to Orthopedics.
Also, more slots for residents and fellows were added to certain service lines and made available to this year’s medical school graduates in anticipation of the upcoming changes in July. These slots were in the areas of BMT, Cardiothoracic Surgery, Neurology, Neurosurgery and Obstetrics and Gynecology.