Sir.—We appreciate Bedrick's editorial comments in the August issue of AJDC.1 We would like to update our experience in more recent schedule revisions. The ultimate outcome measures of the schedule must be the quality of both patient care and resident learning. One must recall that, when night call was changed by a quantum leap from every second night to every third night for interns, studies of that modification were nonexistent. Thus, we are charting new waters. We plan to carefully monitor the quality of medical care with measures addressed by the hospital and Pediatric Department quality assurance protocols. Also, board scores will be closely scrutinized and each resident's yearly improvement compared with the individual resident improvement before the "405" schedule was started.
The only objective data to be reported thus far is the observations by the faculty that (1) the residents are more alert and awake than they