Comment by trowawee

Every single study of the effects of fatigue on human cognitive ability that I am aware of indicate that A) fatigue can have massive deleterious effects on peoples' abilities to perform even simple tasks, and B) people are generally terrible at evaluating their own levels of fatigue. There's a good overview of a lot of this research here: https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-bac.... I don't know exactly what the costs are for more handoffs; my fiancée is a doctor, and she and multiple doctors have told me they have that same concern. But we have mountains of evidence demonstrating how rapidly cognitive ability degrades with fatigue. The idea that doctors, frequently working in a massively demanding, massively stressful setting, are somehow immune to those effects defies logic.