Do Doctors have freetime?

[iZodliquify]

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Like can they plan vacations. When does work start and end. Are they always on-call?

Can they call in sick for the whole day?

 

[RevMD]

Doctors are like every other shift-based professions in terms of sick/vacation time, but I think convenience highly depends on whether you work at a hospital versus private practice. At a hospital, you likely will be rotating as attending doctor on particular days and be on call for certain days. Vacation time just requires making sure someone else will cover your shifts. Working in a private practice gives you the benefit of more flexibility to take a vacation whenever you want and you likely will get more paid sick/vacation days as well. If you really have to call in sick, then you can still do it. Just know that it will probably make your colleagues' day harder because they will have to cover your patients.

 

[J ROD]

Like can they plan vacations. When does work start and end. Are they always on-call?

Can they call in sick for the whole day?

keep dreaming......playoffs!!

 

[SouthernSurgeon]

Doctors are like every other shift-based professions in terms of sick/vacation time

Practicing physicians do get "regular" sick and vacation time, but that has little/nothing to do with being "shift-based." In fact, most physicians are not "shift-based" (exceptions being things like ED docs).

 

[armybound]

You can set up your practice however you want it. Of course your pay and ability to find an accomodating practice will probably be prohibitive.

On a serious note, it's going to depend highly on specifics, especially how established you are in your practice.

 

[FloatOn]

I only know about the hospital setting. Doctors go on vacation ALL THE TIME, even busy ones at busy hospitals. You just have to request what days/weeks you want off ahead of time and the people who make up the schedules will work it out.

Edit: When I say all the time, I mean they have a certain number of weeks off each year and it's not terribly difficult to go on a trip when you want to.

Edit 2: This is for attendings.

 

[TexasPrincess]

My dad is a Pediatrician. He takes 2 hour lunches to play raquetball. He is usually home by 5:30-6pm goes in around 9am M-F. Rotates call. He has most weekends free.

He never takes vacations though. If he wanted to, he would have to hire someone to go in for him because he is a sole practitioner.

His office is closed on national holidays so you can turn those into long weekends.

 

[FloatOn]

Doctors are like every other shift-based professions in terms of sick/vacation time, but I think convenience highly depends on whether you work at a hospital versus private practice. At a hospital, you likely will be rotating as attending doctor on particular days and be on call for certain days. Vacation time just requires making sure someone else will cover your shifts. Working in a private practice gives you the benefit of more flexibility to take a vacation whenever you want and you likely will get more paid sick/vacation days as well. If you really have to call in sick, then you can still do it. Just know that it will probably make your colleagues' day harder because they will have to cover your patients.

My dad is a Pediatrician. He takes 2 hour lunches to play raquetball. He is usually home by 5:30-6pm goes in around 9am M-F. Rotates call. He has most weekends free.

He never takes vacations though. If he wanted to, he would have to hire someone to go in for him because he is a sole practitioner.

His office is closed on national holidays so you can turn those into long weekends.

Yeah, I was thinking that private practice would actually be harder to go on vacation because you don't have nearly as many colleagues to cover for you. After all, you do have a business to run.

 

[scapermoya]

my dad runs the radiology in a small ski resort town with a few other docs. they rotate call, couple weeks at a time. even when he is on call, he can go skiing or hiking or whatever, he just can't be too far from the hospital. these days, especially with teleradiology, he gets a lot of free time.

that being said, he had over a decade of really hard work (after med school) to get to this kind of position.

 

[FlowRate]

my dad runs the radiology in a small ski resort town with a few other docs. they rotate call, couple weeks at a time. even when he is on call, he can go skiing or hiking or whatever, he just can't be too far from the hospital. these days, especially with teleradiology, he gets a lot of free time.

that being said, he had over a decade of really hard work (after med school) to get to this kind of position.

This is the American dream. Which is slowly being killed by radiology outsourcing, from what I hear.

 

[scapermoya]

This is the American dream. Which is slowly being killed by radiology outsourcing, from what I hear.

from what I gather he isn't too worried about it. it might affect my generation of docs, but i don't think so. i can see HMOs and the like pulling shenanigans like emailing CTs to india, but can you imagine what would happen in a medmal case? they would get class actioned into oblivion.

people care too much about their health. if patients knew their films were being read in a foreign country by someone who might not even speak english, they would flip out.

 

[J ROD]

basically, once you are an established attending you can make your schedule to a point.....

 

[Drrrrrr. Celty]

you know..
if i have to work hard for a 'few' decades i.e 22 to 40..
and have smooth sailing afterwords..
hell i'll take that..

 

[cliffhuxtableDO]

you know..
if i have to work hard for a decade i.e 22 to 40..
and have smooth sailing afterwords..
hell i'll take that..

This.

 

[Law2Doc]

... Which is slowly being killed by radiology outsourcing, from what I hear.

Not so much. Poor quality control and liability reasons have given overseas outsourcing a black eye in recent years, and despite the technology enabling this having existed for over a decade, this kind of outsourcing (nighthawking) has not really made any sort of dent in the field. At the places where it is implemented for overnight reads, you hear nothing but complaints. Expect interest in this to continue to dwindle and die. Instead, the current business model is going to be large academic centers remotely taking over the radiology reading of the various local community hospitals and groups.

 

[typhoonegator]

Like can they plan vacations. When does work start and end. Are they always on-call?

Can they call in sick for the whole day?

I can't tell if you are talking about residents or attendings. The answer is very different depending on that.

Residents are required to have vacation time every year. Attendings are not.

As a resident, your chiefs will schedule your vacation time according to the master schedule, usually in 1 week blocks. Note that a "week" does not necessarily have to include weekends around it. But at least this allows you to plan a trip, assuming you have the money to do so.

As an attending, well, there are no rules. Those who work more and harder make more money (all else being equal), particularly early in your career. So many attendings don't get much (if any) vacation time, unless they work for a very large practice or an academic setting. Even then though, someone has to cover for you, and let me tell you that coverage is not fun. Sometimes the hassle of organizing coverage and extricating yourself from the practice for a few days isn't worth the potential gain of a vacation.

Regarding sick days in residency, it's not like you get X number of sick days in residency, as you would a normal job. Some programs do have allowances for "personal days" but this is not the norm. Remember that residents are usually stretched pretty thin to cover the hospital and clinics, and so the unexpected removal of one resident from the pool, even for one day, can cause a huge increase in the work of the remaining residents. As a result (and I'm not necessarily advocating this) many residents work sick to avoid dumping on their classmates. This is why you see residents on rounds with IVs, taking quick breaks to go vomit. This is also why whole residency classes come down with the flu at the same time. However, from the other side of it, when you're already stressed to near the breaking point, having someone call in sick for less than a missing limb and dump a busy service on your lap can result in significant resentment and occasionally blind rage. It is difficult to find a good balance between taking time off when you need it, and trying to tough it out.

 

[FlowRate]

Not so much. Poor quality control and liability reasons have given overseas outsourcing a black eye in recent years, and despite the technology enabling this having existed for over a decade, this kind of outsourcing (nighthawking) has not really made any sort of dent in the field. At the places where it is implemented for overnight reads, you hear nothing but complaints. Expect interest in this to continue to dwindle and die. Instead, the current business model is going to be large academic centers remotely taking over the radiology reading of the various local community hospitals and groups.

I'm really happy to hear that; I find all fields of radiology to be really fascinating, so it was bumming me out when I heard about the potential for imaging to be outsourced.

 

[Hernandez]

what free time I have I spend on SDN telling pre-meds that I do have free time......


as above, it completely depends on how your practise is set up. I have friends that work 7 12 hour days and then are off for a week, and I have others that take 1 weekend a month off....

 

[Law2Doc]

...and I have others that take 1 weekend a month off....

FWIW, in the age of declining reimbursements, this is the much much more common approach. You see folks having to work very long hours simply to keep earning what they earned the prior year. This is a field populated by a lot of workaholics, folks who are very driven, and so the percentage of physicians who are working banker's hours and hitting the links these days is actually not that great. Of course this is also specialty driven -- the folks going into derm or psych probably have much more comfortable hours than the folks going into gen surg and continue to take weekly call even decades out of residency. If you choose a certain path, you choose a certain lifestyle.

As for the OP's original question, most physicians take vacations when they reach the attending level -- the average is probably around 4 weeks a year; some do more, some less. Medicine is an early morning profession, so it's not uncommon for folks to start their day at 5-7 am. It's also not unusual for folks to come home no earlier than a late dinner at the attending level (and perhaps have to go back to the hospital for emergent stuff if your practice encompasses such afterwards), and sometimes not at all at the resident level. Residency, which can be 3-7 years of your life after med school may involve working up to an 80ish hour work schedule, which tends to include overnights in the hospital every 3rd, 4th or 5th night, and working most weekends. Such is life. At any rate, it's very hard to answer the question globally and every specialty, stage of training, and form of practice is going to be a little bit different. Expect to work hard as a physician though -- there's a ton of information to keep abreast of, and the patients who need you will never stop calling.

 

[derek320]

Attendings can get time off, but it can be hard depending on the size of their practice. If you are running your own practice by yourself it would be very hard to get a week off since nobody would be there to cover your patients.

Doctors in larger practices are able to take vacations because they can always have somebody cover their patients while they are away. For instance, I had my knee operated on on a Friday and then the surgeon went on vacation for the next week. So whenever I called with questions I ended up talking to a different surgeon who was in the same practice covering his patients. For them it was no big deal for the doctor to go on vacation.