Did anyone take the hematology and/or oncology boards this week? I thought they were really hard (heme was harder than onc)!! I thought they had a lot of strange and hard questions and was guessing a lot. Would like to hear what others thought.
Heme/Onc ABIM
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I skipped this year, will take Onc next year. A friend of mine felt brutalized by Onc. Heme has always been considered the more miserable of the two and if the ITEs are anything to judge by, I can't imagine why anyone bothers to take the Heme exam.
I considered holding off on heme until next year but I figured I'd give it a shot and get it out of the way. They asked a lot of esoteric questions that would make for mind numbing mental masturbation between academics but really have no relevance for the majority of practicing docs, and more importantly have no relevance in the care of patients.
In all fairness, the exam did touch on some important practicing topics, but I felt in general it didn't seem like they were testing (both heme and onc) you to see if you knew and understood the topics, and most importantly if you could navigate the treatment of a patient in different scenarios.
In comparison to all the steps and medicine boards, I think the authors of the exams failed to write questions that gauge good safe physicians as opposed to trivial pursuit/Jeopardy champions.
In all fairness, the exam did touch on some important practicing topics, but I felt in general it didn't seem like they were testing (both heme and onc) you to see if you knew and understood the topics, and most importantly if you could navigate the treatment of a patient in different scenarios.
In comparison to all the steps and medicine boards, I think the authors of the exams failed to write questions that gauge good safe physicians as opposed to trivial pursuit/Jeopardy champions.
Dumb question: skip? What is the rule for board certification after fellowship for hemeonc? Do academic places vs private practice have a timeline that you have to sit for the exams? I am light years away from being here - just curious...keeps my mind off the typical M4 stuff 🙂
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The rules are different for every job and are laid out in your contract. It generally varies from 1-5 years. Mine is 3, although one of the hospitals I work in requires all physicians with privileges there to be BC at their first privilege renewal which is in 2 years so in reality, I have 2 years.
FWIW, I waited 3 years before I took the IM boards. It was a bad idea from a fund of knowledge standpoint but nobody cared.
