Most humanistic residency programs in Southern California?

I think the Harbor program is pretty nice.
I have colleagues from the Harbor and USC programs and I believe they said harbor was easier with more upscale patients.

I am not sure if this means that you will be going home early without any stress though.

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I think UC Irvine would probably best match what you're looking for. Their call schedule is amazingly light, and the administration seemed really supportive.

If you're willing to move to Northern California, San Mateo would fit like a glove.

MellowYellowCA said:

Great!! It seems like these (below) are the possible options in CA.

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Unless you're in the Navy, you can rule out Naval Medical Center...

MellowYellowCA said:

Could someone help me categorize these - which do you feel would go into more humanistic and which would go into more stressful/longer hours category? Also in which do you see more higher income and which low/no income?

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My recommendation to you would be to do what I did on SDN: Do a search specifying only the Psychiatry forum and type the name of each program in. Doing this, I was able to get a lot of good info on most of the programs you listed here.

You can also check these two threads:
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=671376
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=236066

in which folks who interviewed at lost of programs described their experiences. That'll answer a lot of your questions...

Manicsleep said:

I think the Harbor program is pretty nice.
I have colleagues from the Harbor and USC programs and I believe they said harbor was easier with more upscale patients.

I am not sure if this means that you will be going home early without any stress though.

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I'm not so sure about the upscale patients. Harbor is LA County, too, so it's going to be a little more downscale. However, they do get the chance to rotate at Kaiser and UCLA clinics later on in the program, so maybe that's what your colleagues were talking about. Personally I got a mixed picture at Harbor. When I interviewed, I didn't perceive it to be too resident unfriendly, but I talked to someone else who interviewed there who got the message that they work a ton. Don't know which is more accurate. It's a neat program if you're into public psych, county hospital type of stuff.

As for hour-friendly SC programs, I'd ex off UCLA and UCSD. Both seemed to be a little more on the intense side when I interviewed there. I've heard good stuff about Cedars-Sinai, namely that residents are pretty happy. Also, I heard that UCLA-SFV has a good schedule. Didn't interview at either of these places, though, so I'm not sure. If you're willing to go farther north, UC-Davis seemed to have a pretty good schedule, with very limited call after first year.

UCSD has been very hours heavy during 1st and 2nd year. Speaking as a chief resident

UCLA seemed to work a little harder than us.

Cedars seemed very friendly, but with a small pool of residents, I've heard stories about their workload increasing hugely anytime someone gets sick or drops out.

Everything could change next year though with the new ACGME rules. Nightfloat everywhere?