Partners HealthCare®

Partners HealthCare Duty Hours Monitoring Standards

Partners HealthCare and its member institutions endorse the duty hour requirements of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).  

Trainees who have concerns regarding duty hour compliance in their program should speak with either their program director or, in instances where concerns are to be kept anonymous or confidential, the Director of Graduate Medical Education (John Co, MD, MPH, 617-643-6378).

MINIMUM requirements for duty hours monitoring include the following elements:

• Monthly anonymous duty hour evaluations: ONCE PER MONTH trainees are required to complete an 8-16 question anonymous evaluation regarding their duty hours for the previous month. This evaluation is administered by the GME Office through New Innovations. Trainees are given approximately three weeks (between the 1st and 21st of each month) to complete it. One month each year (usually September) the evaluation is expanded beyond duty hours compliance to include items that will help programs and trainees identify issues that need improvement (quality of teaching, feedback, etc).

The GME Office shares the evaluation results with program directors on a monthly basis, but only in aggregate: NO individual trainee responses will be available to programs.

• DAILY New Innovations (NI) Duty Hours Time Entry is REQUIRED for the following months: AUGUST, NOVEMBER, FEBRUARY, and MAY.  Programs are encouraged to employ daily monitoring via New Innovations beyond these months as the need arises (e.g. to evaluate a potential concern, demonstrate compliance before a site visit, or respond to a citation). It is important to note that NI duty hours time entry allows programs to look at duty hours and compliance by rotation--the evaluations described in # 1 above do not (because they preserve trainee anonymity).

Note: Individual programs may be asked by their hospital education committee and/or DIO to have their trainees monitor duty hours more frequently or intensively if there are concerns raised by an ACGME Site Visit, Partners GME internal review, institutional or program level internal monitoring, or by trainees.

Duty Hour Policy

The Partners Duty Hour Policy was approved by the Partners Education Committee.

Duty Hours Logging and Evaluations

New Innovations is a web-based software application used by trainees to log duty hours and complete the duty hours evaluation.