Cancelling an externship?

[Orthopedic Sturgeon]

I'm a fourth-year student with an externship at another university scheduled in about a month - the externship is 4 weeks of emergency/critical care (2 rotation blocks). I scheduled this externship well before 4th year began. Now that I've experienced more of fourth year, I'm regretting scheduling an entire month of ER, as I don't want to burn out, have realized that 4 weeks of ER is not necessary for my goals, and would like to save money on accommodations.

Would it be poor form/taboo to try and cancel one of the 2 week blocks? The reason I'm doing the externship is mainly because I'm interested in doing a rotating internship at that school.

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[VIN-Foundation]

Cancelling less than a month before your scheduled block is less than ideal. Clinical schedules are often created 6-12 months ahead of time and individual services often want a specific number of students. So it's complicated making all the numbers work and last-minute changes can be difficult to accommodate.

But speaking just for myself, I rather have one less student on a block than have a student that doesn't want to be there. So I would give the contact person a call as soon as you can and discuss the situation and see how they feel about it.

By the way, many rotating internships will have 4 weeks or more of emergency/ECC duty.

 

[britzen]

ER was one of the rotations that burned me out the least to be honest, so also figure out the schedule of the place you're going. It might be better than you think.

At our school you had either 4 or 5 shifts per week that were 10 hours. (At least one week with only 4 days scheduled, so at least one week you got to have 3 full days off).

Once your shift ended you were done - there was no coming in for morning or evening treatments because you got to pass your in-patients to the next shift.

There was no on call either because the ER was always staffed, so once you left or had a day off you really got to enjoy it.

This was much better than some of my M-F allegedly 8 am - 5 pm rotations. For those, I often had to come in for 7 am and 7 pm treatments on weekdays and weekends, plus had on call shifts or ICU duty in top of my regular schedule during the week.

There was also nice overlap between the shifts on our ER rotation so everyone usually had at least 2 hours at the end of their shift to finish up any paperwork, discharges, or rounding. I very rarely had to stay late.

Your mileage may vary, but maybe ask other students at that school how their ER rotations go or ask the preceptor what the schedule is like.

 

[WhtsThFrequency]

ER was one of the rotations that burned me out the least to be honest, so also figure out the schedule of the place you're going. It might be better than you think.

At our school you had either 4 or 5 shifts per week that were 10 hours. (At least one week with only 4 days scheduled, so at least one week you got to have 3 full days off).

Once your shift ended you were done - there was no coming in for morning or evening treatments because you got to pass your in-patients to the next shift.

There was no on call either because the ER was always staffed, so once you left or had a day off you really got to enjoy it.

This was much better than some of my M-F allegedly 8 am - 5 pm rotations. For those, I often had to come in for 7 am and 7 pm treatments on weekdays and weekends, plus had on call shifts or ICU duty in top of my regular schedule during the week.

There was also nice overlap between the shifts on our ER rotation so everyone usually had at least 2 hours at the end of their shift to finish up any paperwork, discharges, or rounding. I very rarely had to stay late.

Your mileage may vary, but maybe ask other students at that school how their ER rotations go or ask the preceptor what the schedule is like.

When I was a student there (admittedly a decade or so ago), I definitely recall having a full surgery day (6-6 or thereabouts), 7 pm treatments, immediately followed by an 8-6 overnight ER shift, and then was expected to go right into another full day of surgery. I didn't even get to go home and had to have someone come and let my dog out. On top of that you were always responsibly for 7s, 7s and 11s no matter what, and were pretty much expected to also do any q4s or q6s or whatever your individual patient needed while they were in the ER. Even though the ER has technicians. I mean I'm as hard a worker as the next person and want to take care of my patients, but all of that on top of rotations is a bear. I recall once asking one of the ER tech if they could please ice my back dog for me because I had had no sleep and had to go to a waiting appointment and I was told off for it. I'm glad they introduced an ER rotation to try to take some of the load off, but the ER shifts on top of normal rotations I've always thought was BS. Running on exhaustion and no sleep helps no one.

 

[britzen]

When I was a student there (admittedly a decade or so ago), I definitely recall having a full surgery day (6-6 or thereabouts), 7 pm treatments, immediately followed by an 8-6 overnight ER shift, and then was expected to go right into another full day of surgery. I didn't even get to go home and had to have someone come and let my dog out. On top of that you were always responsibly for 7s, 7s and 11s no matter what, and were pretty much expected to also do any q4s or q6s or whatever your individual patient needed while they were in the ER. Even though the ER has technicians. I mean I'm as hard a worker as the next person and want to take care of my patients, but all of that on top of rotations is a bear. I recall once asking one of the ER tech if they could please ice my back dog for me because I had had no sleep and had to go to a waiting appointment and I was told off for it. I'm glad they introduced an ER rotation to try to take some of the load off, but the ER shifts on top of normal rotations I've always thought was BS. Running on exhaustion and no sleep helps no one.

YIKES

The ER rotation is pretty great - a lot of people in my year even repeated it as an elective.

I think they introduced some type of ICU rotation this year too to remove the ICU duties that students were doing on top of their regular rotation.

Plus a work cap that's 18 hours - if you're there that long, your rotation has to give you at least 10 hours off to go home and sleep.

Very thankful they've made some changes since you went through. It's hard to learn if you're running on fumes. Can't imagine it's great for patient care either...

 

[WhtsThFrequency]

I think the number of students also played a hand in it. My class was only around 90 people, and it's up to around 130 now. So yeah, having all those extra hands to spread things around is super beneficial in terms of workload (although there are also definitely downsides to larger class sizes too).

Edit - I was mixing up my own terminology. By in the ER I mean ICU (we had ER as in emergency duty assigned, as well as ICU shifts assigned, while on other rotations in addition to your own personal patient care). So you could be on, say, Internal Medicine, and be assigned an overnight call shift as an emergency student, and the next week have an ICU shift assigned). It was very confusing and patchwork. I'm glad to hear they have changed it to proper rotations so people on Surgery, Internal Med, etc. can focus on their primary rotation work.