Hot Docs: Do Tired Medical Residents Make More Errors? Impact of Falling Oil Prices

Do Tired Medical Residents Provide Good Care? The process by which doctors are trained should be changed to improve patient care, a new study recommends. The Institute of Medicine, an independent, nongovernmental group that makes recommendations to Congress, evaluates how well residents manage their demanding training. During the first years of residents' training, they often work long hours without breaks, and the resulting fatigue "contributes to increased errors and accidents." Rules from 2003 limited a workweek to no more than 80 hours, but the new report argues that these changes did not go far enough—"it is also necessary to look beyond hours of work alone as a risk factor during training and to put into place practices, including time for sufficient sleep, enhanced supervision, appropriate workload, and clear and effective handovers of patient care, that will minimize the risk of error in the training environment." The report advises that residents work no more than 16 hours without a break for sleep, and estimates that the price tag for its recommendations could be $1.7 billion—about a quarter of that just to bring programs in line with the five-year-old rules.

Impact of Falling Oil Prices: Declining oil prices will have an impact on the economies of oil-producing countries next year, but the effect should be "localized and manageable," one financial association predicts. The Institute of International Finance, an association of worldwide financial institutions, forecasts that the economies of Gulf Cooperation Council countries will show about a 3.6 rate of growth in 2009—"still solid." The countries are fairly well positioned for the oil price drop because they built up assets and diversified their economies during the recent boom. The institute's George Abed even sees a "probable silver lining" to the slowdown—a decrease in inflation.

America the Diverse: Most Americans say that they "like the idea" of living in communities with political, economic, and religious diversity, a new survey reveals. The poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center, shows the strongest preferences are for areas of racial diversity (favored by 65 percent of respondents) and political diversity (63 percent). Certain demographic groups like liberals and college graduates are most likely to prefer such communities, but in this survey "virtually all major groups, at least to some degree, choose diversity over homogeneity when asked where they would like to live." Pew's report notes, however, that recent Census and election data suggest that "Americans are clustering into politically like-minded enclaves," an idea put forward by authors Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing. This poll leads Pew to speculate that "when the subject is community diversity, Americans talk one way but behave another."

Another Round of Nixon Tapes: The Nixon Presidential Library has opened up another nearly 200 hours of tape recordings from the Nixon White House. The recordings of nearly 1,400 conversations, made between November and December 1972, cover such ground as the presidential election, getting even with Nixon's many "enemies," and air assaults on North Vietnam. This is the 12th release of Nixon tapes since 1980, comprising more than 2,200 hours of conversations. Another 1,200 hours remain to be released. In addition to the tapes, which can be heard online, some 90,000 pages of documents were also released.

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