Work Habits of the 21st-Century Intern

The limitations placed on house staff work hours during the past decade have required program directors to devise increasingly creative schedules and have raised intense interest in understanding exactly how house staff spend their workdays and nights. Baltimore researchers devised a time-motion study of internal medicine interns that was performed in January 2012. They used specially trained undergraduate observers to shadow a convenience sample of 29 interns in two Baltimore hospitals with different day/night coverage patterns; the observers recorded activities on hand-held devices during both day and night shifts.

Interns spent a mean 12% of their time in direct patient care (i.e., making rounds, talking to patients or family members, or …