Work Style Reform of Surgeons needs Medical Innovation

I am from Japan, the country of notorious overtime working and related disorders and death, which is called Karoshi. Over the last 20 years, incidents of Karoshi have been increasingly reported, which pushed Japanese Government. Eventually in 2018 Japan’s parliament enacted the law of workstyle reform. This new law implements the upper limits onto the working hours. It is 8 h/d, 40 h/w, Upper limit for overtime working per month is 45 hours. And that per year is 360 hours.  The medical doctor version of the law for workstyle reform will be enforced in April next year. This new law for medical doctor sets the upper limit of overtime working for two parameters. Max overtime working/m is 100 h, while it is 960 h/y. We have now concern. The new law may collapse Japan’s medicine. The relative number of medical doctors will be significantly reduced. This is a serious problem. Under such a situation with shortage of surgeons, how can we maintain the quality of medicine? It should be mandatory to implement task shifting and task sharing. Actually, in Japan in 2015, 30 procedures, which had to be performed by doctors before, became legally allowed to be performed by nurses, clinical engineers, pharmacists and so on. Today nurses or clinical engineers can hold laparoscope instead of a surgeon. I am convinced that this kind of task shifting does not necessarily have to be done by human colleagues, but can be done also by robots or other assisting system developed by medical innovation.