How does your residency handle grossing duties?

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UncleRico

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Current residents,

I am just trying to get a feel for how many programs have pathology assistants or histotechs helping out in the gross room. From what I understand, most residencies have some sort of system set up to help with grossing, but I have also heard of some residencies in which the residencies do all of the grossing, even the "dump and pours".

My opinion is that there is way too much to learn in a short 4 year pathology residency to be spending a lot of time twisting off bottle tops and dumping formalin through tea bags. Obviously, there are some things to be learned from evaluating the small biopsies, so residents should have some exposure to this, but programs that scut out residents as "cheap labor" to work as bottle openers should be avoided.

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It does vary - at most bigger programs PAs will do almost all of the biopsies. At my program we have surg path during first year at the VA, in which we do process all of the biopsies (prostate cores, GI biopsies, sinus contents, all that) but the workload isn't that heavy, so it really doesn't detract. It is our first exposure to surg path so I think it's reasonable to do. It does get tedious after awhile, but it is only the first year. When we do surg path at the main hospital (starting first year and then going for the rest of residency) the only small biopsies we do are frozens and some derm. PAs do all the rest. PAs also help with the large cases - they can gross in basically anything, although they tend to leave the really complicated stuff for us because it's a lot easier and more practical to sign it out easier when you have grossed it in. Standard big specimens like colon cancer, lung cancer, etc, the PAs do. But we do a lot of those as well - it all depends on the OR schedule for the day and what comes in.

There was a week when two PAs were on vacation when I was on main surg path where I had to gross in a lot of Aortic valves and neck dissections and lipomas, but whatever. It's important to get some experience grossing all specimens, even the mundane.

Of course - these are important things to cover during your interviews or perhaps ask the residents when you are there - in general programs are not going to lie to you about how much help you get. I think sometimes people forget that they CAN ask these questions on interviews, and should.
 
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