How many weeks/days of night call at your program?

[Rads4lyfe]

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I’m a resident at an academic center. We do about 100 nights of call through our 4 years with full dictations. We don’t have attending coverage overnight. I was wondering how this compared to other residency programs. Do you have attending coverage overnight?

We also cover some weekend and evening shifts, but those aren't as bad.

Thanks

 

[CherryRedDracul]

1 week of nights as an R1 with a senior resident supervising (buddy night float)
4 weeks of nights as an R2
3 weeks of nights as an R3
2 weeks of nights as an R4

Saturday night coverage is done by R2s only, and they do about 10 Saturday nights for the year.

We have our own department of emergency radiology and attendings covering overnight. The attendings do not necessarily sit with us, so we're essentially running solo except that they finalize the reports overnight. But we are free to give them a call for second opinions or even chit-chat with them if it's a slow night (and slow nights are uncommon here).

 

[Rads4lyfe]

1 week of nights as an R1 with a senior resident supervising (buddy night float)
4 weeks of nights as an R2
3 weeks of nights as an R3
2 weeks of nights as an R4

Saturday night coverage is done by R2s only, and they do about 10 Saturday nights for the year.

We have our own department of emergency radiology and attendings covering overnight. The attendings do not necessarily sit with us, so we're essentially running solo except that they finalize the reports overnight. But we are free to give them a call for second opinions or even chit-chat with them if it's a slow night (and slow nights are uncommon here).

I broke our night call into days since we work all 7 nights for the week. Wasnt sure if this is the same with your institution. Comes out to about 14 weeks through all 4 years.

 

[CherryRedDracul]

I broke our night call into days since we work all 7 nights for the week. Wasnt sure if this is the same with your institution. Comes out to about 14 weeks through all 4 years.

True, true. I didn't clarify. We work 6 of the 7 days on night float, from Sunday night through Friday night. The Saturday nights are covered by the R2s, so some R2 will tack on the Saturdays with their regular night float to get them over with. For the buddy night float during R1, it's 7 nights straight, Saturday to Friday.

Thus, the total number of nights in residency should come out to 71.

 

[Cognovi]

30-40 nights with overnight attending

 

[guytakingboards]

30-40 nights with overnight attending

holy cow that's nothing. I did 80 nights my second year and another 10 my fourth year.

 

[thatsrad]

104 nights at my program. 2/3 deep night, the rest late 2nd shift.

 

[Dave1980]

We did about 70 full nights in my residency.

To get a real sense of the call experience you need to know what was being fully dictated and what was being wet read for the next day. We did full dictations on everything out of the ER and wet read all inpatient chest/body/MSK cross sectional. For some reason inpatient neuro was also full dictations.

We were a large academic center with crazy neuro cases all night so it felt pretty busy and stressful. We did have an overnight Attending to cover most of the night and I found that to be extremely helpful. They didn't read on their own but were a phone call away if you had a question.

 

[CorneliaSt]

R2 - 7 days IR call (24/7 pager coverage). 20-30 late evening shifts (typically ends after midnight when the overnight senior dismisses you)
R3 - 14 days IR and body intervention call (24/7 pager coverage), 20-30 late evening shifts
R4 - 28 days of nights (no attending overnight coverage) and 28+ days of late evening shifts

Everything is full dictation.

 

[Rads4lyfe]

Thanks for the responses. It's been interesting to see how different residencies compare with most having similar number of night call, minus a few outliers. I hate night call, but I do think it is a good learning experience. I'm not sure what the optimum number should be though...thoughts?

For our IR/DR residents, they are basically treated as fellows during their 4th year. They staff their own procedure room and are in the IR call pool as well as the DR call pool. They are off the call pool during their SICU months. It's quite brutal.

Do you guys think attending coverage is good or bad for training? For patient care?

 

[Dave1980]

Overnight coverage is definitely a good thing for patient care. My sense is that most places have overnight Attending coverage and any places that don't are outliers.

For training it has its pros and cons but overall I think it is good. I learned a lot going through weird cases with the overnight Attending that I would not have gotten from the morning check out when I just wanted to GFTO and go home. On the other hand you don't really get the same feeling that you are signing off on a case until you are moonlighting as a fellow or your first Attending job. IMO a day or 2 into practice and any difference is lost.