Doctors' perceptions of drinking alcohol while on call: questionnaire survey
Tahir Ahmad, Jimmy Wallace, James Peterman, and Norman A Desbiens
BMJ 2002; 325: 579-580.

At its monthly ethics conference in September 1999, the department of internal medicine considered consumption of alcohol by doctors. The conference discussed the case of a young doctor who saw a senior colleague drinking heavily at a party and overheard him prescribing a questionably large dose of medication over the telephone.1 We discussed whether doctors should drink any amount of alcohol while on call.  Previous studies have considered alcohol use that impairs doctors' judgment and whether doctors should attend an emergency if they have been drinking but are not on call. 2 3 Few studies have considered doctors' drinking while on call. We decided to survey doctors to test our hypothesis that doctors rarely drink alcohol while on call but that opinion would differ about usage, depending on doctors' specialty and age.