Quality & Safety in the Literature: January 2021

Healthcare quality and safety span multiple topics across the spectrum of academic and clinical disciplines. Keeping abreast of the rapidly growing body of work can be challenging. In this series, we provide succinct summaries of selected relevant studies published in the last several months. Some articles will focus on a particular theme, while others will highlight unique publications from high-impact medical journals. ### Key points N Engl J Med . 25 June 2020 The 2011 decision by the US Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education to limit resident physicians to no greater than 16 consecutive hours of work1 has been the subject of immense controversy,2 and the impacts of these changes have been the subject of several studies published in the literature.3–6 Readers of Quality & Safety in the Literature may recall the September 2019 edition,7 in which we detailed this controversy and highlighted outcomes from the Individualized Comparative Effectiveness of Models Optimizing Patient Safety and Resident Education research group.5 In that and other recent studies,6 flexible duty hours (allowing for shift durations beyond 16 hours) were non-inferior to standard duty hours (restricted to fewer than 16 hours) in the outcomes of 30-day …