Are these really the people that should be required to work so much? Isn’t their job about handling life and death daily? Wouldn’t we want exactly these people to come fully rested to work every single day and be fully staffed?
I don’t know if there are jobs with similar stakes that are so carelessly staffed and disgustingly paid.
I’ve worked with surgeons in US and Europe. It is definitely worse in the US but surgical culture is also like this in Europe just to a slightly lesser degree.
It’s deeply rooted in medical / surgical culture and much of it comes from not wanting to pay for more of these highly trained workers when you can just squeeze more out of a smaller cohort. Issues with handoffs for patient care are real with shift type work, but this could be improved if it became more standard.
Gen Z is a bit more concerned about these kinds of issues so some changes may be happening soon, but ultimately this will not likely ever self regulate and only legislative changes would effectively change this culture.
It is simply the law.
For example, in Switzerland, no employee may work more than 45 hours per week in the normal case (there are exceptions). Even if the employee and employer agree to ignore this, the employer will get absolutely rekt by the (mandatory) insurance if anything happens to the employee - even an accident in the employee’s free time.
It’s not the same, but similar, in other European countries.