Early signing out in Surgical Residency

[surglover]

While I was doing away rotation in internal medicine at a top university, I noticed that some residents & interns sometimes signed out early to enjoy the day if the other residents/ interns teammates agreed to cover them & attending did not mind!
Does this happen in Surgery/ surgical residencies ? To sign out at 4 p.m or 5 p.m if the other teammates accepts to cover me ?
If this is allowed, this would make lifestyle better & we can enjoy life outside hospital

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[Buzz Me]

Possible...but most services aren't so light that you can sign out by 4 pm. That would only happen if your clinic finished really early, or you didn't have a lot of cases for that day. And if you weren't on consults.

 

[Dirt]

I've been to places where it happened fairly regularly (once a week or so) and places where it never happened.

 

[kitsunepixie]

We sort of do this with our on service teammates...if cases are done early, then we take turns holding the forte, especially if one of us is on call that evening and has to stick around anyway, while the other resident(s) enjoys the day and stays duty hour compliant. We're not very hierarchical at my program.

 

[LucidSplash]

It USED to happen at my program but with the advent of night float this has gone by the wayside. Previously, if all your patients were tucked in and nothing was brewing, you could find the on-call person (either someone on your team or someone on another team who would be cross-covering your service for the night) and see if they would take the pager a bit early. With the new 16-hour (14-hour) workday for interns and the end of junior-level overnight call, everyone has to stick around until night float shows up at 6 or 6:30.

Have I mentioned anywhere on here my utter hatred and loathing for the ACGME recently?

 

[SouthernSurgeon]

It USED to happen at my program but with the advent of night float this has gone by the wayside. Previously, if all your patients were tucked in and nothing was brewing, you could find the on-call person (either someone on your team or someone on another team who would be cross-covering your service for the night) and see if they would take the pager a bit early. With the new 16-hour (14-hour) workday for interns and the end of junior-level overnight call, everyone has to stick around until night float shows up at 6 or 6:30.

Yup. Exact same for us

 

[45408]

Only a little, and not very often. We do often finish around 5:15-5:30 (and the on-call person technically takes over at 5pm, but only if all daytime activities are already done by the primary team). Once in a while I've picked up for someone at 4:30 or so, but not many times.

 

[WentForitandWon]

While I was doing away rotation in internal medicine at a top university, I noticed that some residents & interns sometimes signed out early to enjoy the day if the other residents/ interns teammates agreed to cover them & attending did not mind!
Does this happen in Surgery/ surgical residencies ? To sign out at 4 p.m or 5 p.m if the other teammates accepts to cover me ?
If this is allowed, this would make lifestyle better & we can enjoy life outside hospital

at my hospital we get out before 6PM most days at the main hospital on the general surgery service. There is a nightfloat on call starting at 6.

the service basically runs like this:
a resident and intern are assigned day call every day. There are usually 2-3 residents and 3 interns. The on call resident and intern do all consults during the day and recieve all of the floor calls. They are also doing cases in the OR during this time, though they will usually have a lighter case assignment.

The other residents/cheifs, interns are doing cases/clinic as well. They will do most of the floor work on their patients in between cases so the on call person doesn't have to. the on call people will run labs, followup imaging studies etc.

at the end of the day if PM checks are done, no consults are pending, cases are all covered, and you have nothing left to do you can sign out to the on call person. This usually happens at 5PM-530 but has happened at 430 on a few VERY light OR days.

signout to the night float intern and resident takes 30-35 mins and then the day call people go home.

night float signs out to the day team at 700AM and then stays for didactics a few days a week wed/thurs/friday till 830ish.

 

[45408]

Once we "sent" our chief home for 4-5 hours because there were two other residents there, most of our staff were on vacation (right before Christmas), no cases, and nothing to do. He was the one on call, so he just came back when we were ready to leave.

 

[surglover]

Different systems...Thank you all