There certainly is a stack of work out there showing that performance on night
shifts worsens with increasing age and that ability to adapt to working nights
declines from about the age of 40. Quick search through any HR database will
bring out a lot of papers on it (the phrase you want to look for is "age related
changes in chronotype" or something similar).
This of course does not address the issue that once trainees stop having a
significant service input into EM; and assuming that it is a career people go into
as a long term thing; in the long term we'll have about a third of our doctors
aged over 50 (possibly more if you take into account reduction in hours when
people have a young family) and about a fifth of our shifts needing to be night
shifts. Allow everyone over 50 to drop nights and you've got a serious problem
with either too many people on during the day or the younger doctors doing an
awful lot of nights. Possibly some people will be attracted to night work by a
higher pay rate, but the time and a third in the consultants' contract is unlikely
to be all that attractive (particularly given that CEAs are easier to come by from
daytime activity).
Matt Dunn
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