From FP standpoint, I break it down to Hospital vs Ambulatory, Emergent/Urgent vs Chronic Disease Management.
Majority of FP residencies are broken down into traditional rotations or blocks that you may know through med school (although there are a few programs experimenting with dissolving that system). Generally, if you want to compare inpatient-to-outpatient, during intern year it's 80:20, then 50:50 in 2nd year, then 20:80 in 3rd year; with variations from program to program. Also, in intern year you may have 1-2 half days in your continuity clinic and then it increases to 3-5 in your 3rd year.
Call varies from program to program and rotation to rotation, whether or not there's night float, and how your program handles hospitalization of your continuity patients.
At unopposed FP programs, when you're rotating with subspecialists (or "off-service") you usually work with 1 or a group of attendings, and you do everything they do: clinic, their hospital service, their consults, and whatever procedures/tests/operations.
Hospital rotations tend to have patients with higher acuity, but you have more diagnostic tests or treatment options at beck and call; e.g. consults are seen the next day, you can order stat labs or imaging, you can have 24 hour monitoring like checking vitals, checking labs for treatment response, making patients NPO, getting them physical therapy...
Ambulatory rotations tend to have patients of more stable acuity, although not necessarily "easier". Labs take time, consults/referrals take time, and imaging takes time. You have less control over the patient (you can't control over a patient's diet, activity, medication compliance like you can in the hospital). You have less monitoring, presumably because you don't need to. So sometimes, the diagnostic uncertainty is a little higher because of those things and sometimes you have to make the decision whether to put someone in the hospital or not.
And the further out you go, the less you have. For example, if you travel to 3rd world country, you'll have less things available to you. Or your clinic may not have everything you need. Or if you're out on the football field or at a nursing home, you have less things to use and start to rely more on physical exam. Sometimes, getting a history is very difficult, especially in the elderly and in kids/adolescents.
There are a lot of similarities but also a lot of differences.
In IM, you're mostly hospital-based. You rotate through all the IM specialties. Generally, IM residencies have less continuity clinic compared to FM. Some IM programs will have outpatient months.
And your hours and calls vary. Sometimes during hospital rotations, I leave after my work is done or I'll stay until I hand off the pager (7-7) or I might need to work weekends. In clinic, I may be there from 8-5, no weekends.
At my program, if a lady I've been following in OB goes into labor at 2 am, I wake my butt up and go to the hospital to deliver that kid regardless of what rotation or clinic schedule I have. I'll take care of mom and kid and then see them in my clinic.
It's hard to generalize across residencies. It just all depends on the set up of the program. And census too. I don't think describing a program as "IM lite" or "OB lite" or "Peds lite" truly captures what goes on.
