I suppose there was some ambiguity in my original post and I apologize for that. I'm just trying to improve patient care in my institution and work with these hours restrictions. Unfortunately by limiting time in the hospital it's increased hand-offs dramatically, and I'm trying to fix the scheduling issues but I've run into some push-back from higher ups. There aren't any golden weekends at my institution so I'm not ruining anything special for anyone, just trying to improve continuity of care and minimize the possibility for mistakes to be made.
Sadly at my institution they still seem to favor giving each intern one weekend day off a week, so on a team of 5 in the MICU (including night-float) 3 interns are off each weekend day. (Wouldn't make sense with math, but as one of the interns has to work one night to give the night float one day off, they are essentially off the day team on that particular weekend day). With each resident carrying 9-10 patients, as the "covering intern" you write sometimes as many as 30-35 progress notes, fewer if you're lucky and the on-call intern isn't working up a new admission. And no matter how great our signouts are, things still get missed. We haven't had a sentinel event, but our program appears to be begging for one.
At other institutions I've seen that only one resident from a team is permitted to be off any given day of the week to prevent this situation. From what I can gather this cuts down on medical error due to quality of handoff's, etc.
Just trying to make my program better guys not piss and moan! If you've got some constructive advice I'd be glad to hear it!