Policy Piece 004
The Shift Never Ends. Why Ghana's Junior Doctors Are Running on Empty A doctor who hasn't slept in 30 hours is still expected to read your scan correctly, get your dosage right, and notice the thing that doesn't add up. Ghana's health system asks this of its youngest doctors routinely, and calls it training. The Issue House officers, the doctors in their first two years of practice, are the backbone of Ghana's public hospitals. They are also, by design, among the most overworked people in the building. Shifts stretching past 24 hours with minimal rest are standard, not exceptional, in the Ghanaian and wider West African training pipeline. A study of obstetric providers, including house officers, at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi found that 62 percent reported burnout (Lawrence et al., 2021). A separate study of health workers in resource-constrained Accra hospitals documented burnout severe enough to produce measurable physiological strain, what research...
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