From The Harvard Business Review.
Find Out Whether Your Surgeon Has Been on Vacation
It’s well known that in workplaces with routine tasks, workers’ productivity falls if they take too long a hiatus from their jobs, and apparently there is a similar effect for surgeons. In a study of 188 surgeons who performed coronary bypass operations, Jason M. Hockenberry of Emory University and Lorens A. Helmchen of George Mason University found that for a given surgeon, each additional day away from the operating room subsequently raised patients’ mortality within one day of the procedure by 7.4%, perhaps because after time away from the job, surgeons are less likely to recognize and address life-threatening complications.