post by Bill Gardner
Aaron Carroll recounts an amazing incident (reported here by Carey Goldberg):
In 2007, Sophie Currier of Brookline, holder of M.D. and PhD degrees from Harvard, asked for extra time to take an all-day medical board exam. Her daughter was four months old at the time and exclusively breast-fed, and she needed more than the standard 45 minutes of total break time to pump her breast milk. The test’s overseers, the National Board of Medical Examiners, said no.
There are many things wrong with Canadian healthcare, but I would be deeply shocked if this happened here. The laws vary slightly across province, but mothers get a year's paid leave. Perhaps for this reason, there seem to many more female hospital CEOs and chiefs of medical departments here, compared to the US.
The point is that the problem may be bigger than just the need of physicians to haze their apprentices. The US should support parents with maternity and paternity leave rights comparable to those in Canada and Europe.
Agree! It is sad when U.S. Children's Hospitals punish women for loss of "efficiency" (i.e. revenue for the hospital secondary to # of patients billed )due to breastfeeding breaks, but publicly proclaim breastfeeding as vital.
Posted by: Jonathan Slaughter, MD, MPH | 01/29/2012 at 05:52 PM
I agree with you Jon. It would be much less of an issue here in Canada, since the mom would have paid leave.
Posted by: Bill Gardner | 01/29/2012 at 09:57 PM