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A medical resident worked 207 hours of overtime in a month. His case highlights Japan’s continuing problem with karoshi - death by overwork.
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207 hours/month = 51.75 hours overtime per week, or a 92.75 hour workweek. Until recently, US residents worked those hours, too (it’s now technically capped at 80 hours, but there are exceptions.)
Medical training is toxic.
80 hours.
What an absolute acid trip of a country.
Find a country where medical residency doesn’t work like this. It’s an archaic holdover from the 1800s era when student doctors were trained by apprenticeship
The Netherlands has pretty strict laws on how much you’re allowed to work, 12 hours max a day 60 hours max a week and you can deny working overtime.
But…. apprenticeships don’t have to be like that. Like there are apprenticeships for many other jobs, and they never are this abusive and awful.
I mean, yes. That’s why medical residencies need to be reformed. There’s zero reason they should be paid so little and made to work so many hours. None whatsoever.
And, in fact, I often make the argument that the current structure of medical residency actively harms patients because it filters out people with disabilities or even just normal smart people. Because the types of individuals who can tolerate and succeed in long, drawn-our, deeply abusive working environments are very, very, very different from the populations that they are then tasked with serving.
We wonder why physicians are so often out of touch with the struggles of their patients, and I think the structure of their training contributes a lot to that problem
Sounds like Hazing to me.
It’s absolutely hazing. So is a lot of nursing school, though much tamer. I point this out to my colleagues frequently.
My apprenticeship is 4 years long and I work 36 hours a week, then need to do the learning and academic work which is around an additional 35 hours a week.
I’m just rolling into year 4 and I’m pretty tired now.
I’m also the only one left, everyone else who started in my cohort has dropped out because of the workload.
During Covid I worked about 72-80 hours per week. It was awful. We were pulling guard on stockpiles of COVID vaccine since our president of our university was from Iran and he expected crazy right wing terrorism to try to destroy or steal them.
Money was incredible; the overtime was AWFUL. I single handedly think working that 6 months of overtime is now why I medically retired.
Same here. I worked overtime 45 out of 52 weeks in 2020. Only to come out of the pandemic and still have hospitals trying to push too many patients on us, understaff us, supply chain shortages… And they wonder why so many healthcare professionals have burnt out and quit the field.
On June 5th this year, the Nishinomiya Labor Standards Inspection Office approved the family’s claim and officially recognized Shingo’s suicide as a work accident. Recognition of suicide as a work accident allows the surviving family to receive compensation and claim damages.
Konan Medical Center compensated the Takashima family by paying them the amount of money Shingo would have received for working 207 hours and 50 minutes of overtime in the one month prior to his death.
The “compensation” is his earned overtime back pay?? Is that it, or am I missing something?
I was expecting some sort of widow’s pension or big payout.
So generous.
This has been going on for so long that it even found its way into pop-culture entertainment like Anime. Every other Isekai-Anime starts with the protagonist being worked to death by an abusive (dark) company. Its almost like a common disease in japan.
The plotline to stardew valley comes to mind.
Zom 100 as well
The key here is medical resident. They’re abused in every country and forced sleep on call in the hospital and pay is shit compared to attendings.
This shit right here. We need to completely overhaul the medical residency system. Corporations are literally killing these workers for profit and the hazing culture of medicine continues to ignore that fact.
Yeah, let’s not forget that the residency system was designed by someone who took massive amounts of cocaine…and back then the concentration of work was not nearly as bad…
Damn, I work around 36-40 hours a week, and that’s enough for me. I work to live, I don’t live to work.
Managers in the US must be foaming at the mouth.
Kinda sounded like the protagonist from the pharmacist isekai
Ahh, Karoshi (search it on the web). If a language has a word for it, it’s nothing special.
Man and here I am complaining of working 3AM + weekends.
When I started my company, we had a recession a year in. I worked 80 hour weeks for about 6 years and my wife not much less but she tapered off in 4. Twelve hour days Monday to Saturday and a 8 hour day on Sunday. Occasionally I took a day off and did do 2 week holidays. Did another 60 hour weeks for about ten years after. That is not that uncommon as a new business owner mind you.
The work is not that hard but if people are dying, I suspect it has much more to do with stress.
So idk who that is but I mean okay but medical residents don’t get 2-week vacations, ever. They don’t get to control what hours they run and end up with shifts so long that they’re using stimulants just to attend said shifts without passing out. Apples and flapjacks, you’re comparing.
I suspect they do get vacations but I suspect it can be quite stressful particularly for some people that don’t manage stress well.
Not that they get to choose, with entire quarters blocked off and never 14-day cushy vacations.
You think I got to choose? Mostly was ok we are not quite so busy and I going to take some days off. Typically your trying to work around all the employee days off. Ultimately the buck stops at you when you’re in that position.
Did your employees get two weeks at a time?
Pretty much always. Within two years that increased to three. Think most broke that up a bit.
Fascinating, glad they got multiple 14-day vacations, and it’s still completely irrelevant. We’re on about medical residents.
