Should a Brain Surgeon be up at night with a baby doing night feeds ?

[Mondaytuesdayhappydays]

Should a surgeon working full time, operating on patients each day be up with a baby at night doing 2/3 hourly feeds.

If they were operating in your child and had had only 3/4 hours sleep each night over the last fortnight would this be acceptable to you?

Agree

I do think that parents should share night time feedings where possible (I breastfed so it was never possible for us, instead DH would get up early to take over baby so I could get a few reliable hours). But the decision as to what is possible has to factor in whether someone is working outside the home, what their responsibilities are etc. if I’m a bit foggy & exhausted at work, I can do a simple task I’ve been putting off like going through my filing & shredding.

however doctors do spend years of exhausting training & should be able to function on little sleep tbh. My DH used to do 24 hour shifts in one job.

You know the answer to this, OP, but you haven’t told us what else is going on…
IF you come home from work, help out with the baby and do your part with the household chores, then sure, you should be allowed to get your eight hours sleep, while OH deals with night-time feeds.
However, if you come home from work, eat a dinner prepared by your OH, then disappear to somewhere to “relax” for a few hours (gaming/watching tv etc.) while letting OH do everything else themself, then that relaxation time is stealing your sleep time, and not the baby/your OH…

Aren't doctors working crazy hours anyway? In our local you'd have doctors who are on call on site after a full day shift, so by the morning they're dead on their feet. So the set up without a baby is working on no sleep.

What happens when like my NCT friends and both parents are surgeons?

They should, but they don’t. Not until they are consultants, probably doing private work as well.

My DH is a surgeon and was in training when my DD was born. Not sure how much people think surgeons, especially trainees (it can take up to 18 years to become a consultant) earn, but when my DD was born we did not have the money for extra help. He was disturbed sometimes at night but no more than when he was on call at the hospital and working the next day. Surgeons have lives like everyone else, well at least most do.

Presumably one is taking leave and doing the night feeds.

You are massively overestimating how much doctors get paid (presuming we’re talking about the UK). Especially in neurosurgery - there’s a huge lack of consultant jobs so most are stuck at registrar level on trust grade contracts for years (and having a PhD is almost essential to even have a chance at a consultant job so I’d imagine most having babies are in the registrar bracket due to the length of training). These jobs are usually advertised with a salary of around £50,000 but I have seen them go as low as £30,000. Not loads to fund a night nanny on!

Are you the brain surgeon OP?

No but I would compromise with extra night help in the form of a live in nanny overnight during the more difficult period

Babies don’t just magically sleep through the night when maternity/paternity leaves ends.

In other safety critical industries, fatigue is considered an organisational risk that needs to be managed - an airline is required to have a formal fatigue risk management system for example. They know people have babies, get divorced, go through penomause - they expect a level of fatigue and have reporting systems for staff to be able to say they don’t feel safe. Some also now monitor staff remotely using wearables so that the onus is taken completely off the individual.

That is not currently happening in healthcare - it is considered an individual risk, as most of the comments on this thread illustrate. There is a key problem of resource and residual risk that doesn’t play out in other industries - a flight being cancelled is an inconvenience but not a safety risk. An operation being cancelled will itself be a safety risk - is it safer to have a tired surgeon or no surgeon?

So its really complex but it is definitely something that needs to improve.

Please have a read of this report if you are interested!

I'm interested in how they know.

No.

ditto plane pilots, bus drivers etc

Doesn’t really matter, the range is huge and if on the lower end then it would need to be carefully planned. Paying for help for a specific duration is something that can be thought of ahead of time and accounted for when considering children.

The cost isn’t massively different to the cost of nursery fees many pay for years. If overnight, for a short temporary time.

If this is about a poor ickle male having to do his share then he won’t be up that often. If the baby is feeding 3 hourly and it bottle fed then both parents should be able to sleep in 6 hour amounts. They need to go to bed early. People find ways to function. Plus the stints get longer.

If it’s a female post maternity leave breastfeeding a baby that won’t sleep then 🤷🏻‍♀️

The answer is either way the surgeon judges if they are fit to work.

Should brain surgeons not have kids in case their sleep is disturbed? Should they pop out a baby then leave it with their partner and move into a hotel until the infant sleeps through the night? What about brain surgeons who've just fallen in love and are besotted to distraction? Should they be allowed to operate? How about the ones who are caring for elderly parents, or who are recently bereaved, or are supporting their teenage kids through serious stuff in their lives, or the ones who have any aspect of their life which might detract from their performance at work? How about the brain surgeons who've had a kid with another brain surgeon? Should they each stop working until they are able to get eight hours' sleep a night? How many parents of pre-school kids get eight hours sleep a night anyway?

Brain surgeons are normal people with lives who happen to have a job where they operate on brains. If you'd rather the brain surgery wasn't carried out by a normal human surgeon who is subject to normal human life events, I'm sure you could choose for your child not to have that surgery, though you might be waiting a while for an alternative to come along, and perhaps you'd rather the surgery was performed than not performed. Surgeons are entitled to have lives outside of work. I'm sure it's shitty as hell when a child needs brain surgery; but there just aren't very many optimally-rested, unstressed and unimpacted-by-life-events surgeons, and if surgery was only carried out by such near-mythical surgeons, there wouldn't be much surgery getting done.

There was an interesting snippet on the What's Up Docs podcast, or perhaps it was on Doctors Notes, recently, observing that many people carry out many of the very important, impactful events of their life having not had 'enough' sleep - exams, job interviews, court appearances, high-profile presentations, that really important piece of work with the looming deadline... Tired people turn out to be pretty good at hyper-focusing on the thing they have to do, e.g. brain surgery, it's the other bits of life that suffer first - maintaining patience and good manners rather than snapping at colleagues, doing the life admin and household chores before/after work, making a packed lunch to take to work rather than buying a sandwich and coffee in the hospital canteen, summoning the motivation to go for a run after work. A tired brain seems to prioritise pretty effectively.

Why is said brain surgeon not on maternity / paternity leave?
surely the surgeon has a few days off a week whereby they could do the night shift if they are not working the next day?

For what it’s worth I’m a doctor, DH is also (and a surgeon, although not neurosurgery). When I was on mat leave DH did any feeds up to about midnight and then got up a bit earlier to do the morning bottle, nappy etc so I could express, shower and have a coffee. He’s now on leave (we’re doing SPL) and I’m back at work so we’ve swapped (although lucky DH doesn’t have to do the express…). When we’re both back at work we’ll take it on a day by day basis. If DH is on call or operating then I’ll do more overnight as my specialty isn’t patient facing so there isn’t the same intensity/acute stress. Then days when he’s on clinic, development, zero days etc he’ll do more overnight so I can catch up. We’re a team - we both need to be able to function.

All these posters thinking neurosurgeons are millionaires. A senior registrar might earn £60k, not generally considered to be a massive salary.
Consultants earn more, obviously, but many surgeons are not consultants.

It depends on the job of the other parent surely? If one is a brain surgeon and one is a bus driver, then the bus driver would need more sleep. If the other parent is office based the brain surgeon should get more sleep.
My DH used to drive miles for his job so I did night feeds. However whoever gets the most sleep should do the first feed of the day and they should do night duty when they're not working the next day.

This. 2-3 hourly feeds suggest a very young baby, so the parent taking the maternity/parental leave does the night feeds. As PP pointed out, The NHS has good maternity leave.

And as a different PP pointed out, neurosurgeons don’t actually operate 7 days a week. I’m sure someone bright enough to become a brain surgeon can work out a solution.

Lazy journo or a Uni student doing research. You can spot them a mile off, they only ask a question, don't give an opinion and don't come back to join the debate.

My DH works for emergency services, and when he was on duty, he slept in the spare room. Being sleep deprived could have been dangerous for him.