Inside the Struggle of Medical Interns: A Call for Change

Dr. Uri Rosen, a family medicine intern at Wolfson Medical Center, shared with news outlet "Yedioth Ahronoth" the surreal lives of hospital interns—gruelling work with 26-hour shifts, minimal food, and immense responsibility. Dr. Rosen is among the interns who have recently protested, demanding immediate implementation of shift reforms under the slogan: "Your lives are worth more."

Amidst the protest, Dr. Rosen describes the daily survival struggle:

"A regular shift day starts like any other workday at 8:00 AM, dashing between departments. If it's the internal medicine department in winter, there are more patients than usual. In the morning, we rush between patients, and by 3:00 PM, it’s shift change time, meaning I'll be alone with an inexperienced intern."

"In the department, there are high-risk patients who don't have a place in intensive care. Meanwhile, more people keep arriving at the ER; we need to hop from patient to patient and check all their medications. In the midst of it, there's a 40-minute resuscitation to attend. After sweating it out in resuscitation, I have to continue seeing more people in the ER, unable to go to the bathroom or eat. That's what a regular shift looks like."

"There was a day at 11:00 PM, after 26 hours of running around, I sat hungry next to the nurses, with a throbbing headache from dehydration. They brought up an elderly ventilated patient from the ER, perhaps just to die in my care. At the same time, I have an intern for whom this is the first shift, he hardly speaks Hebrew and doesn't know how to use our software. I was alone with 39 patients, each with their own issues. I had to sedate a patient deeper because he resisted his ventilation. The department was a chaotic buzz all this while."

"I moved the elderly woman to the trauma room and stabilized her breathing. This is precisely when mistakes can happen. It's only midnight, I'm exhausted, tired, responsible for 40 people each suffering from multiple health issues. In the army, this wouldn't be allowed, pilots can't fly this way, but I have to sit and calculate antibiotic doses for the patient. If I make a mistake, I could kill her. There are feelings of guilt from the mistakes we make, and we do make mistakes. We're scared. Everyone is scared."

"One morning, after wrapping up a shift at 10:00 AM after 26 hours, I headed home. Even though it's a short drive, I found myself dozing off at the traffic light in the intersection and woke up with a car crashing into me. I am not the only one; many of my colleagues have had accidents post-shift."

"When you arrive at the hospital at 7:00 PM, the ones who will attend to you are interns who have been working for countless hours. These are the people treating you. The job requires a lot of concentration both mentally and manually, and I'm responsible with my hands for 40 patients—alone. In the best-case scenario, there's an intern with me, and in the worst case, the intern doesn't speak Hebrew or know the systems. People need to understand that the person treating them at 9:00 PM is someone suffering from depression after working 400 hours a month. A person chronically sleep-deprived, malnourished, and inadequately trained. That's the factual reality. And none of this is changing."

"Everyone knows this, and the body managing it has been incompetently failing its duties for 20 years. We hope the new health minister will want to change this."