atients can only welcome the prospect of stricter limits on the number of hours that medical residents will be allowed to work in the nation's teaching hospitals. Nobody wants a bleary-eyed beginning doctor, numb after extraordinarily long hours without rest, to be making critical medical decisions or performing surgical procedures.

The new rules are to be imposed in July 2003 by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which oversees doctor training in the United States. They are similar to a longstanding law in New York that limits the hours that residents can work. Unfortunately, that law has not always been vigorously enforced.

People accustomed to a 40-hour workweek may find it shocking that the new rules will reduce the residents' workload only to an average of 80 hours a week, with no more than 24 hours consecutive. Moreover, the hospitals can boost those numbers to 88 and 30 for certain purposes. But even that can be considered progress in a world where many residents have complained that they were working more than 100 hours a week, sometimes even 120 hours, often for 36-hour stretches at a time.

How vigorously the new rules will be enforced is not yet clear. The Committee of Interns and Residents, a union with some 12,000 members, complains that the council has been doing little to enforce its existing, weaker standards, so there is no certainty that it will get tough now. The council insists, however, that it will enforce the new rules aggressively, using confidential Internet surveys of residents to ferret out violations. Hospitals that violate the rules could lose their training accreditation and substantial government funding.

Despite the tough talk, the council faces an inherent conflict of interest. Its board is dominated by the trade associations for hospitals, doctors and medical schools, all of which benefit from the cheap labor provided by medical residents. The teaching hospitals alone could face millions in added labor costs at a time when their budgets are already strained. Bills have been introduced by Senator Jon Corzine of New Jersey and Representative John Conyers of Michigan, both Democrats, that would set limits on the time that residents can work. Codifying the rules into law would be a sensible step to increase the pressure for vigorous enforcement.