My worst year was my fourth year. It was because I was a chief resident and some of the attendings were blowing off their work, including teaching, but also dangerously leaving 1st years unsupervised over some tough cases so the residents complained to me, so I brought it up to the PD and she got ticked off with me for bringing it up. One of the attendings never even saw any of the patients or gave supervision. He just showed up, signed off on the resident's note, left and it turned out (later proven) that he was double-dipping. That is he was working somewhere else while he was supposed to be at the hospital, keeping it secret so he could earn two full time salaries. The PD even accused me of lying about it without even looking into the situation herself. There were bad outcomes as a result of this lack of supervision.
So for about 6 months of that year, here she was calling me a liar in front of the department, and by about 2 months before the year ended she found out everything I said was true cause bad outcomes were happening and when the hospital looked into it, the data irrefutably pointed to me as telling the truth (e.g. the GME would call the attending in question and he never answered, called the unit and he wasn't there, etc.)
By about 2 months of the PD's abuse, I told the GME what was going on and to my relief they even told me they knew the PD had issues. By about 4 months into the situation, they told me they believed me cause they did their own investigation into what was going on and were even upset and disgusted that the PD just carte blance decided not to look into the situation. By about 6 months the PD did finally fess up and she did notice that pretty much everything I said was true, but never apologized and even made statements that some of the concerns I brought up she never knew about as if I never brought them up in the first place (yeah right, she's calling me a liar to the head of the department because I brought them up).
So I left my program pretty much disgusted. My original PD that I had for the first three years was phenomenal and the new one had big shoes to fill. It would've been unfair to have expected her to have done as well as the original guy cause that's how darned good he was, kind of like trying to live up to Capt. Kirk when he left the Enterprise, but heck, lying, falsely accusing a chief resident without even looking into the situation, etc. those crossed the line.
I also didn't drop the bomb on the above because there were still some good docs at the program I highly respected and such a declaration could make the entire department look bad, but from a SDN/resident's perspective there probably is no more important attending for that person to factor in than the PD.
I was on the forum back at that time but in my attempt to avoid reaction formation I did mention there were problems and they were being fixed (they were, by then it was out in the open so it had to be fixed) and in a more neutral tone than my program deserved, but in hindsight anyone acting in that manner is likely not going to fix their own personal issues that led to those bad decisions overnight.
It was a bummer too cause it tarnished my entire view of the program that was overall good until that year. Other bad things happened such as doing a forensic rotation with a psychiatrist close with the department that was pretty much a hired gun and I caught him embellishing on the stand to defend a guy that was very much obviously malingering and testing even showed he was to a degree of confidence over 95%.
Just for clarification the program was not St. Louis U. where I'm currently at or U of Cincinnati where I did fellowship. If anything those events sharpened my desire to work with good people and consider that a factor more important than the salary. Right now I work side-by-side with three highly respected doctors in the field of name-brand recognition and they are very good people, not just professionally, but just very humble and respectable.
