How are PGY-1 and PGY-2's tasks divided?

[laserbeam]

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With so many things to do everyday, do PGY2s work like bosses, ordering things for interns to do and leaving on time, or work with interns as a team, getting everything done for day together? I understand that progress notes are exclusively for interns.

 

[Winged Scapula]

With so many things to do everyday, do PGY2s work like bosses, ordering things for interns to do and leaving on time, or work with interns as a team, getting everything done for day together? I understand that progress notes are exclusively for interns.

Says who?

As far as I'm concerned, its a team and no one is above doing ANY part of the job. That means that progress notes are most definitely not just for interns. at whatever senior resident pulled that one on you.

Truthfully, there are some places and teams which are more hierarchical and it will vary from program to program, and rotation to rotation.

We had a PGY-3 who tried that "its intern work" thing and got a talking to from the PD about how we worked as a team and to stop trying to act like a PGY-3 was above doing certain chores. That's how my program rolled.

 

[agranulocytosis]

With so many things to do everyday, do PGY2s work like bosses, ordering things for interns to do and leaving on time, or work with interns as a team, getting everything done for day together? I understand that progress notes are exclusively for interns.

Where I'm at, depending on the hospital, the 2 usually fields the consults when the team is on call, otherwise we're essentially one in the same - we all write daily progress notes. At the VA, the 2 or 3 will cover the ICU and write their notes, and at the private hospital, the 2s will usually write the notes on the primaries while the interns will do the off-floor consult peeps. When it comes to assigning cases, the interns will usually get the trachs, PEGs, inguinal hernias and I&D's, while the 2s will typically get the lap chole's and ventral hernias.

Interns get busy with floor calls, 2's get busy with consults. It's a different kind of busy, but both have their load to carry.

 

[bjackrian]

Says who?

As far as I'm concerned, its a team and no one is above doing ANY part of the job. That means that progress notes are most definitely not just for interns. at whatever senior resident pulled that one on you.

Truthfully, there are some places and teams which are more hierarchical and it will vary from program to program, and rotation to rotation.

We had a PGY-3 who tried that "its intern work" thing and got a talking to from the PD about how we worked as a team and to stop trying to act like a PGY-3 was above doing certain chores. That's how my program rolled.

I agree that there's a lot of variation from program to program (and specialty to specialty). In my program (peds), interns were expected to write the daily notes up to a maximum that was set by the program. If there were more patients than that (which usually happened on weekends only), the senior and/or the attending were expected to write notes too. For new patients, the H&P's were also primarily intern notes, but when the team got slammed, a senior would pull off some of the patients to do him/herself, especially straightforward or ICU cases.

I'll say that I was surprised by how much work I did as a senior behind the scenes that I had no idea about as an intern. Not having to write notes is not the same as not having to do work! I also do think there's some benefit to "forcing" interns to be efficient by giving them an expectation for how many notes to write because some of our PGY2 rotations are places where there are only PGY2 (e.g. ICUs), the patients are more complicated, and there isn't anyone to bail you out if you haven't learned to work efficiently.