Emergency Residents' Current Status and Preferences for Shift Work During Extra-regular Working Time in Korea

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: The workload of emergency medicine residents (EMRs) is expected to be high. Especially, and working during extra-regular working time (ERT) provides them with great stress. In spite of this, their workload and preference for shift work during ERT has not been studied in Korea. METHOD: The postal survey was sent to the EMRs of training hospitals. The survey consisted of 10 questions which assessed their shift lengths, shift-length preferences, degree of fatigue after night shift, allowance for an ERT shift and so on. The analysis was done using the SPSS Win program. RESULT: Surveys were sent to 240 EMRs and eighty-two (82) EMRs responded. Most of them (85.4%) had more than 10 night shifts per month. The most common shift lengths were 12 hours (53.7%) and 24 hours (23.2%), and the most preferred shift length was 12 hours (50.0%). More than half of the EMRs felt very tired after night shifts. The desired allowance for an ERT night shift was 2.1 times on Saturday, 2.5 times on Sunday, and 3.6 times on holiday, compared to that for a weekday night shift. CONCLUSION: The current workload of an EMR is very high. The desire from ERT shift is low, so appropriate strategies should be sought to compensate the ERT workload.