How does your program/group deal with ...

[urge]

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residents/attendings who do not want to work on Saturdays for religious reasons?

How is call distributed fairly?

 

[pjl]

They work. I don't want to work Christmas, Sundays, Easter etc for religious reasons, but that doesn't fly either. The sabbath (assuming that is the argument) is sacred for many, however there are biblical provisions for people in our situation caring for others. As long as a sabbath is observed it need not be on a particular day.
If you give them all Saturdays completely off we would need a different person to cover, so 3 on per weekend instead of 2 (Sunday is backup Saturday). It could be done at great expense I suppose, but I think it would cause major issues in a small group.

 

[deleted126335]

We had a guy awhile back who disclosed this on the interview. We offered him a position where he would do a disproportional amount of Sundays as recompense. He wound up not joining. We are big enough that this was not a major issue.

 

[Gasworks]

NOTHING will make up for someone in the group that doesn't cover saturdays. Soaking up good calls with pre/post benefits doesn't help anyone either.

 

[somedumbDO]

NOTHING! We wouldn't hire them. Usually people that are that obstinate are poor partners/employees

 

[BuzzPhreed]

You don't have to tolerate this as a group. If this is disclosed up front, I don't care if they are Ronald Miller or Paul Barash. Don't hire them.

 

[Mman]

Negotiation.

I will assume this gets brought up prior to somebody being hired. I mean I can't imagine anybody keeping their mouth shut and getting hired and then breaking this news the first time their name is on the schedule for a Saturday.

So you negotiate. If you want to hire them, you either pay them less for not taking Saturday calls or you work out that they take more calls on other days to offset it. For my particular group they'd have to take a decent pay cut since our weekend coverage schedule makes it very hard to have somebody not work on Saturday.

 

[Noyac]

If you have religious reasons not to care for people in need then don't go to med school.

 

[dozitgetchahi]

Believe it or not, in NYC some formal accommodations for this exists. The Jacobi IM program has/had a 'Sabbath track' that allowed Orthodox Jews the ability to always have Saturdays off.

Apparently this was inspired by this lawsuit:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york...ts-religious-discrimination-article-1.1108821