Exploring Work Pressures and the Culture of Silence in Medicine

Are health services around the world wilfully blind to the problem of dangerously long hours being worked by junior medics?

Vivienne Nunis speaks to doctors in Australia and America about how tiredness and depression are not only ruining their lives, but also pose a threat to the safety of patients going under the knife or receiving prescriptions. And it's a worldwide problem - as Sydney-based doctor Yumiko Kadota discovered when a blog she wrote attracted similar stories of exhaustion from Colombia to Poland.

Author Margaret Heffernan says the culture of many health systems is one of wilful blindness to the physical limits of human employees, while the campaigning American medic Pamela Wible MD explains how it is driving many hospital staff to suicide.

(Picture: Exhausted surgeon resting his head on operating theatre table; Credit: Universal Images Group via Getty Images)