I don't think lighter call is necessarily a great yardstick for the quality of a given program, but I do think that how a program views the importance of resident-wellness and response to resident needs is a vital (and sometimes tough to judge) component.
Workload is an interesting tension from a faculty perspective. On the one hand, we like to encourage wellness, including the development of a healthy balance between work and non-work. At the same time, there are real-world people to care for, and residents are one way to get the work done. And at the same time, faculty are ambivalent about setting up the last formal training experience to be, well, too easy. I think we realize that psychiatry residency is emotionally difficult, but it's pretty easy to compare the hours of our residents to, say, surgeons, and perceive that psych residents tend not to work as hard. Further, there is a lot to learn, and paring back on work hours does diminish the amount of patient care the resident will ever get supervised on.
And patient hours are reduced not just to let residents get home early or take less call. Whenever a program allows for elective or research time, fewer patients will be seen. This means that department resources/money will get diverted from other areas (faculty, perhaps, or infrastructure) in order to pay the moonlighters who are covering responsibilities that had been covered by residents. And it means that residents may (MAY) get less solid training.
One important reason programs diminish schedules is out of generosity and a spirit of holistic wellness. Another, separate, reason is that the overt reduction in hours is a blatant recruiting tool. That is one reason that "hidden gems" are likely to mandate fewer training hours: they recognize that they are a bit hidden and want to ratchet up their place in the selectivity hierarchy. The alternative is to be seen as a sweatshop and gradually recruit badly. The only other way out of the dilemma is to be the PD at one of the 5 or 7 most selective residencies (we can argue which programs are the best and the best fit, etc, but the most highly selective programs know exactly who their competition is just by looking at the match results); these programs remain highly selective partly because of geography (NYC, SF, or Boston, anyone?) but also because those same geographical biases are shared by faculty so that these programs tend to have very deep faculty benches--and, at least in NYC, there are lots of affluent people who want to see MD therapists and pay top dollar, which allows the faculty to compensate for base salaries that are less than what they'd get in private practice and often less than what they'd get at the less prestigious places down the street or across the country. And the PD's at these most selective places are under much less pressure to reduce workload since, well, they keep getting great residents, and they do generally believe that people get better training when they get more training.
So, as chair, you have a bunch of competing (and diverse) subgroups--residents, faculty, infrastructure, deans, administrators--all of whom need to be made reasonably happy. And even if the PD decides she/he wants to reduce the workload, PD's tend not to have the actual power to make that decision. It has to be a department or institutional decision since it means less work will get done, fewer patients will be billed, and something else will get reduced. It's a zero-sum game, and resident happiness is but one variable in the puzzle.
