I was wondering why I rarely hear about being on call as a medical student, yet so far the med schools I've interviewed at briefly mention that we'll be on call about twice a week. So as a 3rd or 4th year, do you end up almost hitting the 80 hr/week work limit? And do pretty much all schools require call about every 4th night? Do you just see the patient before the intern?😕
You've actually hit on a pet peeve of mine. I think that pre-meds find out very very little about what 3rd and 4th year are like, and that 3rd/4th year education should play a much bigger part of the decision making process than it does.
I always tell applicants on their tours not to pick schools based on who has the nice shiny new anatomy lab (since you'll spend 1 semester there, tops), but to try and find out more about what the clinical years are like.
That said, the experience is different almost everywhere, and on almost every rotation. Here is my shot at describing the clinical years:
-Call schedule:
For me, call on OB was 2 24 hour shifts (in a 2 week span), call on peds was q4, call on medicine q4 (or q6 at the VA), and surgery call 1x per week.
The 80hr workweek doesn't apply to med students, and on the more intense services you will probably go over it (as you are inexperienced and thus inefficient - so you have to get there earlier than the interns to get your work done, and leave as late or later to finish up your daily tasks).
-Call activities:
--Medicine and peds: In an ideal world, being on call means you see the newly admitted patients first, and then come present them to the intern or upper level resident, and also participate in any interesting procedures or activities going on on cross-cover.
--Surgery (if it is an emergency or trauma service): you need to be ready for whatever comes in - you may spend the whole night in a big trauma case, or just help manage the SICU/post-op patients. If you are on a specialty service, you will get called to the ED for consults as needed (eg - ortho consult comes to see the broken arm)
--OB: it's all about catching babies and c-sections
*However, if call nights get busy, the med students quickly take a back seat to the need to just get the work done - so you may not get to see the new admits until after the intern, the resident may be swamped and forget to page you, and you end up sitting on your bum being tired with nothing to do.
**Also, your residents and interns will frequently take pity on you and send you home at a reasonable hour - this typically happens when (a) you've already done a ton and have as much on your plate for the next day as you can handly, or (b) there is nothing at all going on