Hour

An hour is a unit of time we use as a reference to divide our day into chunks. And we can talk in hours: a couple of hours to get to university, an hour just to reach the centre of Madrid, five hours to visit Villajoyosa, twelve hours to fly to Ecuador, an hour for lunch, an hour for swimming, an hour to spend time with someone, a couple of hours to watch a film, an hour to watch an episode of a series.

A day is divided into twenty-four hours. Nowadays people work eight hours a day and spend eight hours sleeping. An hour is enough to travel, to eat, to create. Eight of them, used well, are more than enough for a doctor to do their job. The other sixteen exist for a reason. And yet we keep accepting systems designed for a different era. We measure our days in hours precisely because time has limits — and so does human endurance. A doctor is no exception.

Doctors working twenty-four-hour shifts are doing something anachronistic. I have heard that this practice was implemented by a doctor who used drugs such as cocaine to stay awake. Doctors who deal with life and death ought to be in good condition when working. If a hospital needs doctors around the clock, it can run at least three shifts — but rarely have people working twenty-four hours in a row.

Sometimes I hear people say that everything has already been invented. That is nonsense. We can use imagination and creativity as fuel to persist, resist, and continue developing our societies. We can create new systems.