ER schedule and weekly commitments?

[senza_sordini]

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Hi all,

I'm a current vet student interested in ER after graduation. However, due to the irregular hours, I'm worried I won't be able to have weekly commitments outside of work. For example, an activity that would require me to have every Tuesday evening off.

Would any current/past ER vets mind sharing their experience with navigating this?

Thanks!

 

[pp9]

Hi all,

I'm a current vet student interested in ER after graduation. However, due to the irregular hours, I'm worried I won't be able to have weekly commitments outside of work. For example, an activity that would require me to have every Tuesday evening off.

Would any current/past ER vets mind sharing their experience with navigating this?

Thanks!

At the place I worked, and the several places I interviewed, your shift was fairly consistent. And you could make 'preferences' known as well. So while no job will say that they guarantee you will have every *insert day here* night off until the end of time, they can do their best. Additionally, I don't think I've seen an ER job that was more than 3 days/week. So avoiding a specific day altogether might be easier than you think, especially if you are willing to work weekends. Most people prefer to work weekdays/weeknights, so if you are fine with weekends you'll be fine. I worked most weekends during my FT ER days and was off Mon-Thurs pretty consistently for the years that I did it.

 

[pp9]

Adding on to this though, if you were unable to get a schedule that allowed for that day/night off, then you'd be very unlikely to ever make that activity. ER shifts are usually 12 hours, like 7-7, 8-8, etc so unless it's a late night activity, you'd miss it. Even if it was a super late night thing (like 10pm) personally I'd be too tired lol.

On top of that, it's challenging to leave an ER shift on time. A lot of that depends on how the night staff comes in and handles the day to night transition and case rounds. For example, at the BPs I worked at, my typical day shift was 7a-8p. Night team used to come in at 6p (for a 6p-8p shift), but due to reasons it got changed to 7p. By the time they were hitting the clinic floor, it was 7:15p if those docs arrived on time. Then you are 'competing' with your fellow day shift ER team (and the specialties, in my case) to round them your hospitalized cases so you can leave. At the same time, the night docs are also supposed to start taking the incoming triages so day shift doesn't get stuck with starting a case when they're supposed to be leaving. So that was a really challenging time. Sometimes I wasn't able to round them until 830-9pm or later because they were busy, and I was still wrapping up cases, and we couldn't sit down for 5min until that time. And that's coming from someone who essentially never had to stay late to write records, which is another issue most docs have trouble with.

 

[battie]

Just left ER after 3.5 years with a corporate owned hospital group (was there when we were just 1 hospital -> 2 -> 3 -> 2 when they closed our middle child hospital).

I'll echo what PP said. I came into the job wanting Friday through Sunday and Wednesday guaranteed off as my schedule due to childcare and was given basically told absolutely. So I was pretty much weekends only until last fall, where my schedule was shifted to Thurs through Sat. They wanted me to have a weekend day to try to entice me to stay when things started going downhill. 😅

The hours you work depend on the hospital culture. We were pretty focused on being out on time. So we were all generally 10-15 minutes early for our shifts to start rounding so the previous doc could GTFO. The swing doctor waited for the day doc to round the night doc before rounding their hospitalized cases. We also made it a point that a doc could start a case and then pass it on as long as things weren't crazy town. But we were also hourly, so that did make a difference there. Swing doc would also tell day doc to stop taking cases about 45-60 minutes before the end of the shift if they wanted. Overnight would send swing home early if it was chill.

Records was it's own thing. We had a doc that literally never stayed late for records. She had templates that she plugged and chugged. Others relied on AI. We did have some that would need to work on records for 3+ hours per shift (which is a group problem when you're hourly...).

Towards the end when corporate was putting their hands up in everything, the culture did break down. People were late leaving regularly. If I was day 8am to 8pm on a Saturday at our north hospital, I wasnt home until 11 or 12 (with a 20 mile drive home).

You absolutely can have a life in ER. It depends on your efficiency and your culture at work.

 

[JaynaAli]

I don’t have near the amount of experience that bats and pp9 have, but I will say that ER can be a very temperamental beast and swings even more wildly than other aspects of the vet field. What I mean by that is that when ER is in demand and need for ER vets outpaces availability, you can probably pretty much dictate your schedule and places will comply in order to get you secured for shifts. But when there’s economic downturn/correction or when the job market is such that there are more applicants than positions and thus they are more competitive, you rapidly lose that negotiation power and may have to just take what’s on offer. That happens in other fields of vet med too, but it seems to be even more volatile in ER…I’ve been around for the lows of the 2008-2012 years, the highs of the COVID-boom, and all the years in between. The field has been slowly shifting for a couple years now and with the onslaught of new schools/more grads and student loan repayment changes, things may change even more from how they are now and it’ll become less and less of an associate’s market.

 

[senza_sordini]

At the place I worked, and the several places I interviewed, your shift was fairly consistent. And you could make 'preferences' known as well. So while no job will say that they guarantee you will have every *insert day here* night off until the end of time, they can do their best. Additionally, I don't think I've seen an ER job that was more than 3 days/week. So avoiding a specific day altogether might be easier than you think, especially if you are willing to work weekends. Most people prefer to work weekdays/weeknights, so if you are fine with weekends you'll be fine. I worked most weekends during my FT ER days and was off Mon-Thurs pretty consistently for the years that I did it.

Just left ER after 3.5 years with a corporate owned hospital group (was there when we were just 1 hospital -> 2 -> 3 -> 2 when they closed our middle child hospital).

I'll echo what PP said. I came into the job wanting Friday through Sunday and Wednesday guaranteed off as my schedule due to childcare and was given basically told absolutely. So I was pretty much weekends only until last fall, where my schedule was shifted to Thurs through Sat. They wanted me to have a weekend day to try to entice me to stay when things started going downhill. 😅

The hours you work depend on the hospital culture. We were pretty focused on being out on time. So we were all generally 10-15 minutes early for our shifts to start rounding so the previous doc could GTFO. The swing doctor waited for the day doc to round the night doc before rounding their hospitalized cases. We also made it a point that a doc could start a case and then pass it on as long as things weren't crazy town. But we were also hourly, so that did make a difference there. Swing doc would also tell day doc to stop taking cases about 45-60 minutes before the end of the shift if they wanted. Overnight would send swing home early if it was chill.

Records was it's own thing. We had a doc that literally never stayed late for records. She had templates that she plugged and chugged. Others relied on AI. We did have some that would need to work on records for 3+ hours per shift (which is a group problem when you're hourly...).

Towards the end when corporate was putting their hands up in everything, the culture did break down. People were late leaving regularly. If I was day 8am to 8pm on a Saturday at our north hospital, I wasnt home until 11 or 12 (with a 20 mile drive home).

You absolutely can have a life in ER. It depends on your efficiency and your culture at work.

Thank you both for the insight! The ER I've been working at only does rotating shifts so that made me a little worried. It's reassuring to hear that some ERs offer more consistent schedules. I'll definitely have to put effort into finding a clinic that is compatible with my lifestyle.

 

[senza_sordini]

I don’t have near the amount of experience that bats and pp9 have, but I will say that ER can be a very temperamental beast and swings even more wildly than other aspects of the vet field. What I mean by that is that when ER is in demand and need for ER vets outpaces availability, you can probably pretty much dictate your schedule and places will comply in order to get you secured for shifts. But when there’s economic downturn/correction or when the job market is such that there are more applicants than positions and thus they are more competitive, you rapidly lose that negotiation power and may have to just take what’s on offer. That happens in other fields of vet med too, but it seems to be even more volatile in ER…I’ve been around for the lows of the 2008-2012 years, the highs of the COVID-boom, and all the years in between. The field has been slowly shifting for a couple years now and with the onslaught of new schools/more grads and student loan repayment changes, things may change even more from how they are now and it’ll become less and less of an associate’s market.

That's interesting to hear! In my area (GTA), it seems like GP is actually the more volatile field right now while ER has remained relatively high demand. I'll have to hope that the struggling economy doesn't catch up to ER once I graduate 🥲

 

[pp9]

Thank you both for the insight! The ER I've been working at only does rotating shifts so that made me a little worried. It's reassuring to hear that some ERs offer more consistent schedules. I'll definitely have to put effort into finding a clinic that is compatible with my lifestyle.

Pros and cons. Having done the set schedule thing and been stuck on weekends for a long period of time, I would have loved for a true rotating schedule. Our schedules technically did 'rotate' every 3 weeks but people with seniority kept the weekday/day shifts pretty much always and the rest of us got the undesirable shifts, so we were more of less locked in to to our schedules. When you're stuck on weekends/nights for long periods of time it can really mess up your QOL depending on your situation outside of work. If the clinic truly forces everyone to rotate, that can be a good thing. Still, if you are truly 110% fine working weekends constantly, you won't have trouble getting weekdays off long-term.

That's interesting to hear! In my area (GTA), it seems like GP is actually the more volatile field right now while ER has remained relatively high demand. I'll have to hope that the struggling economy doesn't catch up to ER once I graduate 🥲

I second that ER can be really volatile. Early COVID had a lot of us fearing for our jobs before everything boomed a little unpredictably. ERs depend on seeing a lot of big ticket cases because the overhead is insane. People love to complain that ERs are so much more expensive (and they are) but the cost of running a 24 hour clinic is astronomical. I'm not a practice owner so can't pretend to know a ton about GP numbers but just from a staffing perspective alone they are needing to bring in a fraction of the revenue a 24-hour ER needs to bring in on a daily basis.

I'd start tuning in to your relief communities to get a good idea of how the market is in the area you want to live in. They are often the canary in the coal mine. Just 2 years ago the relief community in my current metro area was swamped with work and high bids were getting picked all the time, now people are supposedly bidding <$1000 for a full day in the ER which is insane to me. You could not get me into an ER without me walking out with at least $1000 post-tax.

 

[battie]

The relief ER market in Denver right now is trashed. But that's what happens when multiple hospitals and urgent cares close in an 18 month period