Health care professionals is a weird one, because while long shifts are dangerous, patient handover is also dangerous and there may be an argument that longer shifts means fewer handovers which could result in better patient outcomes.
Would we accept this if they were dealing with nukes, rather than people? Yeah we let people who haven't had sleep in 36 hours handle the nukes because having the people involved talk to each other between shifts is hard.
They do know roughly how long it takes to take care of a patient & should be set up with overlapping shifts and to be winding down towards a normal shift (i.e. no new patients) so that there's no handoff of a single patient but no one is working long hours. Some patients might take longer than a single shift, but handoff is inevitable at some point. You can improve your handoff processes but you can't improve the decision making of someone working a 12 hour shift.
Maybe but I won't claim to know how to quantify things to evaluate proposals. I do know that even in tech with low stakes, hand off is a problem. I recall hearing teams trying to do 3 on-call teams in 3 different timezones and the team requested to scale back to 2 with longer hours because of the handoff problem (& these hand-offs were occurring daily).
I would prefer fewer patients per doctor then. It seems that the problem is due to the limited supply of doctors. In both countries where I lived, supply of doctors was artificially limited by regulation.
