Difficult Working Conditions of Hospital Doctors

In February, Kyodo News reported that the Nayoro Labour Standards Inspection Office in Hokkaido had pronounced the death in 2003 of a male pediatric doctor (then 31) as an industrial accident. According to the bereaved family, the doctor was responsible for emergency visits and pediatric outpatients, in addition to three night duties per month, and worked overtime in excess of 100 hours a month in the year before his fatal heart attack.

Coincidentally, on February 19, the Japan Federation of Medical Workers' Unions published the results of a survey on working hours of hospital doctors, highlighting hostile working conditions in which doctors can neither get enough sleep nor take holidays due to constant long working hours.

The survey, carried out between November 2006 and January 2007, targeted doctors in medical institutions and municipal hospitals across the country affiliated to the federation. The results published recently as an interim report concern 1,036 hospital doctors in some 150 institutions who replied to the survey.

The results indicate that doctors' daily working hours averaged 10.5 (nearly half of the respondents worked 12 hours or more a day), and that weekly working hours averaged 58.4 hours (one-third of the respondents worked 65 hours or more a week). The average number of days-off taken in the month previous to the survey was 3.3 days, while 27% of the doctors surveyed replied that they did not take any days-off that month. When asked about the longest period of consecutive working days, the average response was 19.5 days. The survey also reveals that one-quarter of the respondents had one night duty every week; 95.8 percent had experienced having to work immediately after night duty. The average overtime was 63.3 hours per month, while 31.2 percent of the doctors surveyed replied that they had done overtime in excess of 80 hours per month, the criterion considered significant in accounting for industrial accidents.

In late February, the Labour Lawyers Association of Japan submitted a written statement on the government's proposal for the revised labor standards law (to raise overtime premium rates from the current 25% of normal wages to 50% for overtime exceeding 80 hours per month), insisting that overtime in excess of 80 hours per month should be prohibited without exception, since that amount is a yardstick for Karoshi (death from overwork).

The harsh reality uncovered by the findings of this survey was that some 50 percent of the hospital doctors surveyed replied that they want to quit.