No offense taken -
Residents, in general, like to complain. Let's face it, residency sucks no matter what field you're in - and the grass is always greener in another field.
When you complete your training, you can decide on what type of practice/lifestyle you wish to develop. If you want to work 40 hrs per week and do only outpatient surgery - you can. Send anything complicated to your partners (if they do it) or to a tertiary referral center. In general, the remuneration is higher if you do only bread and butter, and the lifestyle better. Hence, the reason why most private docs (at least in my field) do the easy, fast turn over, high volume, less risk surgeries. It is not that they weren't trained on the complicated stuff - just that they look at the economics and decide that their time is better spent on income generating activities. In academics, there are residents to take care of the post-ops, weekend rounding, ED consults, etc that are unavailable to the private docs. The academician is more likely to have a couple rooms running, with senior residents in one room taking care of the more mundane parts of a case, and can focus on a critical portion in another room. Because of this, their productivity goes up and remuneration increases due to increased volume to make up for the labor intensive/less pay per hour invested cases.
That being said - there are a few of our attendings who work long hours - most do not. I think that the private attendings, in general, work similar hours, but spend more time on administrative things (billing, coding, office management, etc) that the academician does not.
So to make a long story short - many ENT procedures are same day surgery (esp facial plastics, otology, laryngology) others pts spend a day + post op (head and neck) but I think that you'll find that once in practice, most spend the majority of their OR time in private practice with same day surgery and the occasional pt who stays overnight for a day or two. I can't speak about urology (never worked with them) - but I hear it is similar (a lot of cystoscopies in private, I'm told).
Go shadow a couple private guys in each field to get a feel of what they do in clinic and ask to see their recent operative cases to get a feel for their breadth of surgical practice. Most are keen to have an interested medical student and wouldn't mind showing you the ropes.
