Oh nice! This is what I'm interested in! What kinds of things can they and can't they do without supervision? What is common in practice? Is there a good place to read about how this all works?
There a black joke amongst doctors in the UK where all the junior doctors start in the same week each year the mortality rates go up :-)
Indeed, and it's not even a joke, but a real phenomenon.
Sources :
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2896592/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21747093
Then ... that means the supervision of residents is not working. That basically means, it's useless. (Since it'd make sense to apply the maximum amount of supervision when a resident is new and as the resident gains trust, decrease it.)
Or of course it means, that attending doctors do a constant amount of (insufficient) supervision, or they ramp up supervision after someone screws up... :|
Yes, because they aren't yet trained to practice medicine. Residency is where they are trained to practice medicine.
> Do they require so much supervision?
Yes, both by practicality and by law.
> If residents are just cheaper doctors
They're not "just" cheaper doctors
> then hospitals would optimize for a high resident:attending ratio.
They tried. Patients died. Now we cap both the number of hours they can work per week (80 hours/week) and the resident:attending ration.