Katherine Kellogg's Theory

The life of a person who goes into medicine is rough. The person starts by doing a pre-medicine track in their four years of undergraduate studies. He or she takes classes that bring the best knowledge out in people and push them to do their best. Once the person graduates, they have two to four years of medical school. Finally, after eight years of school, the students have their residencies and possible fellowships that last multiple years. During their residencies, the amount of work hours used to be 120 hours a week, but then there was a reform to promote a change to these hours. This reform decreased the amount of work hours to 80 hours a week. Katherine Kellogg (2011) explains her theory behind how and why the reform worked in a select program in Challenging Operations: …show more content…
In the Introduction, Kellogg (2011) provides background information on the reform. She explains that the previously stated harsh hours could make the residents tired in practice and when they left the hospital. After many car accidents caused by overworked residents, the American Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) stepped in to regulate the work hours. Even though they changed the law of the work hours, there is resistance against it. In her research, Kellogg (2011) decides to observe three similar hospitals, Advent, Bayshore, and Calhoun, to discover how the change happened and why. She does this by conducting interviews with residents, attendings, and directors and completing an ethnography. Kellogg (2011) describes that there are two levels of change that are observed: the micro and macro levels. On the macro level, there are some theories that support how the hospitals achieved the reform. These include the Neo-Institutional Theory, Law and Society Theory, Social Movement Theory, and Medical Sociology. The Neo-Institutional Theory states that change is brought upon by different institutional