When The Doctor Is A Sieve, It Strains All Our Resources

In residency, we had a term for ER docs who always seemed to find an excuse to admit patients to the hospital. We called them sieves. A newly admitted patient would arrive to 5 West, we would talk to and examine them, study their tests, and wonder how the heck they found their way to a hospital bed until, inevitably, we would realize: “Dr. S is working the ER tonight!”

I always wondered whether our judgments of these sieve-like physicians…