Surgeon s working week A surgical resident s average work week is approximately 75 hours Some subspecialties of surgery such as neurosurgery require even longer hours and utilize an extension to the 80 hour regulated work week allowing up to 88 hours per week Many surgical programs still exceed this work hour limit Attempts to limit the amount of hours worked has been difficult because of the large volume of patients who require surgical care the limited amount of resources including a shortage of people willing to enter into surgery as a career Dorsey et al Influence of Controllable Lifestyle on Recent Trends in Specialty Choice by US Medical Students the need to perform long operations and still provide care to all pre and post operative patients and the need to provide constant coverage in the OR ICU and ER I removed this It doesn t seem to belong in an article on medicine maybe it belongs in Surgery or something even more specific like Surgeons in the USA It s about as relevant as a paragraph in the article on Sport explaining the types of injuries basketball players typically suffer from Actually I d like to remove more waffle from this section but I left it alone for now There is SOME relevance in explaining that it takes time effort and talent to become a surgeon