Over the years, there have been numerous threads (presumably from past residents) warning medical students/applicants to avoid certain programs. If there was such a thread posted about your program (and perhaps there has been), A) How would you respond to such accusations, both publicly and within your department, and B) What advice would you give to potential applicants who read threads and have doubts about your program?
Nuriko,
These are excellent questions.
A. As a general principle, I do not feel a response is necessary to these posts. After all, everyone has the freedom to post their thoughts about their own experiences. I believe this website was established more than 20 years ago, and if I am not mistaken there are more than 380,000 posts in the Anesthesiology forum alone. Times passes, programs evolve, and ultimately I do not feel it would be either a benefit to anyone or a good use of my time to chase down and respond to every perceived slight or rumor that might be out there.. Maybe I would change my mind if I was made aware of something written that is intended to deliberately harm us. But outside of something that borders on libel, it would be hard to imagine any members of our team wanting to engage.
B. To the medical students and trainees here who read those posts and use them as a basis to form opinion, the phrase "Trust but Verify" is strongly applicable. You do yourself a grave disservice by making a potentially career altering decision based on what an unknown person with unknown motivations writes on a public forum. A dissatisfied resident likely references a number of things they feel are wrong, some objectively verifiable and others being subjective feelings about their experience. Issues about duty hours, the amount of call, or how vacations are scheduled are fairly easy to corroborate. As for subjective terms like "malignant" or "unsupportive" it is wise to reserve judgement until you know the full context of what happened.
Let's say a resident describes uses those very terms in a post, "The attendings here are all malignant and the program has never supported me." Imagine these two scenarios and how they make you feel about the program.
1. This resident endured overly harsh criticism from an attending after making a common CA-1 error like intubating the esophagus, that attending then spread a bunch of rumors about how horrible this resident's technical skills and now his nickname among the faculty is "goose." The response of his program was to tell him to just toughen up and there's nothing they can do.
2. After verbal counseling, written counseling, being asked to attend institutional ethics and conduct training, and an internal performance improvement plan, this resident was deemed by his clinical comp committee as ABA unsatisfactory for professionalism and received a corrective action of probation due to continuing verbal abuse and physical harassment of hospital staff. He is informed that any issues going forward will result in either extension of his training or termination.
Clearly I'm using two fairly extreme examples, but the hope is to illustrate that context is everything.
I would also advise students and trainees to understand that not everyone makes the right choice in the match. Unfortunately some candidates make errors in self-assessment which result in match decisions that place the resident in a program or specialty not suited to them or their family. I mention this only because when I think of the unhappiest residents we've had here, our biggest administrative successes have been working with the them in finding the right place. In all the cases I've been involved in, I am glad to say that these residents have thrived.
I'd finally like to point out to the students that as a general observation, the opinions here can be somewhat hyperbolic. Understand that individual experiences may have justifiably led to some of those positions (PP vs. academics, fellowship/non-fellowship, CRNAs vs. MDs, hospital admin vs. physicians, good vs. bad programs), but those experiences are not your own and are rarely a broad representation of what happens across the spectrum of the specialty. Reality is usually more nuanced than an opposing pair of passionately held sentiments. In some ways, the debates about these issues closely resemble the sides people take in political discussions. But the good news for you is you have WAY more than two options with respect to specialties, jobs, and practice/compensation models. No, not everyone's interests are aligned with yours, but if you do your homework and know yourself well, the future is very bright.
