During medical training, final year medical students throughout Victoria, faced so much fatigue that they ceased looking after the patients, whom they had originally intended to help out.

These would-be doctors, who are immensely talented, will start practising from January. And they feel that ''Safe hours'' is a term that is restricted to just the instructions on paper. The veracity is that junior doctors work far more than their scheduled shifts.

It has come to surface that the shifts of 61% of the trainees and resident respondents were known to put patient’s life in danger. The duration of working hours, total number of hours put in every week, etc. contributed to the extent to which the patients’ lives were at risk.

Also, the amount of work done during the night and whether the interns get ample time to unwind, were among the factors that determined the care of the patients. The survey was carried out by the Australian Medical Association.

The bottom line was that the ''riskiest work patterns are still commonplace''. It is an accepted fact that there are bound to be errors when doctors are made to work overtime. And this is especially true in the case of interns, who are made to work long shifts in the name of training.

It is the patients, who suffer the brunt of these overstretched working hours. Junior physicians become so exhausted that they don’t respond to patients with empathy and respect. They fail to show willingness to answer their queries.