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Most Doctors Work While Sick, Despite Knowing It's Bad For Patients

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: July 9th, 2015, 7:00am UTC

An anonymous reader writes: A new survey published in JAMA Pediatrics found that 95% of doctors believe patients are put at risk when doctors work while sick. Despite that, 83% of respondents said they had "come to work with symptoms like diarrhea, fever and respiratory complaints during the previous year." The researchers doing the survey dug into the reasons for this: first of all, given the heavy workload of most doctors, it's very difficult to find others who can take up the slack when one is recovering from an illness. Beyond that, the profession is pervaded by a culture of working through the discomfort and pain of minor maladies. According to a commentary on the research, hospital policies don't help matters mdash; they often incentivize long hours and don't encourage ill workers to leave the premises.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Most+Doctors+Work+While+Sick%2C+Despite+Knowing+It's+Bad+For+Patients%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1eE7uUP"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F07%2F07%2F2317229%2Fmost-doctors-work-while-sick-despite-knowing-its-bad-for-patients%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/07/07/2317229/most-doctors-work-while-sick-despite-knowing-its-bad-for-patients?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/07/07/2317229/most-doctors-work-while-sick-despite-knowing-its-bad-for-patients?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/wTTA8PKJTYo" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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