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’.
