Patients should be told of sleepy doctors

NEW YORK, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- An editorial in a U.S. journal argues that patients should have notice that their physician may be sleep-deprived.

First author Dr. Michael Nurok, an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician at Hospital for Special Surgery, says in an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, studies show sleep deprivation impairs psychomotor performance as severely as drinking alcohol.

A study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed an increase in the risk of complications in patients who underwent elective daytime surgical procedures performed by attending surgeons who had less than a 6-hour opportunity for sleep during a previous on-call night.

People who are sleep-deprived are often unable to assess accurately their degree of self-impairment, Nurok says.

"Sleep deprivation affects clinical performance. It increases the risks of complications. And it is clear from survey data that patients would want to be informed if their physician was sleep deprived and that most patients would request a different provider," Nurok says in a statement. "We think that institutions have a responsibility to minimize the chances that patients are going to be cared for by sleep-deprived clinicians."