How difficult and/or inconvenient is it to book your own surgeries?
Booking your own surgeries
- Thread starter erasable
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Depends on 1.7 million things.
1 - where are you doing residency?
2 - are you rotating at a county, VA, private hospital?
3 - are you in residency or faculty?
4 - what kind of surgery/OR time do you need? what kind of surgery IS it?
5 - maybe even the year of training you are in
those are just a few that come to mind.
That's like asking how difficult and/or inconvenient is it to make a bowl of pasta
1 - Major City
2 - Private and Indigent patient clinics
3 - Residency
4 - Every surgery done in residency
5 - All years of training
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If a residency is advertising this, it's definitely not as a strength. While I, fortunately, never had to do this in my training, there were those who preceded me that did. It's a real pain and something a resident should not be responsible for. It's very time-consuming and not nearly as easy as: "Hey, when do you want to have surgery? Cool, see you there!" You have to deal with multiple players (patients, their families, insurance carriers, pre-op, the OR, etc.) You also have to handle late cancellations by filling those gaps quickly. Otherwise, your surgical numbers will suffer.
As a resident, you should be able to focus your time on mastering the clinical and surgical knowledge/skills, rather than being bogged down in the mire of scheduling and other secretarial work. It's not even a worthwhile skill to obtain. Once in practice, you will have staff to do such things for you.
As a resident, you should be able to focus your time on mastering the clinical and surgical knowledge/skills, rather than being bogged down in the mire of scheduling and other secretarial work. It's not even a worthwhile skill to obtain. Once in practice, you will have staff to do such things for you.
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Well said. I have on occasion booked my own surgeries on the VERY rare occasion that an OR day was unfilled and I had some free time to do surgery. We have a great surgical coordinator who cleared a lot of the red tape, but it still takes a lot of extra time and effort. Overall, this should be the exception rather than the rule. If a program is having you book the majority of your own cases as a resident, I would see this as a hindrance to your education and a huge red flag.
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Agree.
Being aware of the steps in getting a case to surgery, in all the tedious detail even, is valuable when it comes to setting up a practice of your own, but there is little value in having to do that for all of your cases in residency. That is an indicator that the department or facility where you are working is under-supported in clerical staff. Having you do this is like having you order all of the IOLs for your cataract cases, or having you do all of your visual fields exams or drawing all of the blood for preop clearance studies. Knowing how to do these tasks should not require you spending your time regularly doing this during residency. If a program is requiring all of that legwork, they are poorly managed and possibly poorly budgeted. Although in this day, I can imagine some clinic administrator cutting staff and just figuring that it is OK to make residents do the secretarial work.
That is a bad idea and detrimental to efficient training. And it is a negative feature if they are admitting to making this their practice.
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