No, you still have to be a resident. Even in Peds and FP.
That's why it's residency, and not shiftwork. If you don't want to put in the hours, and the blood, and tears, and sweat, and missing birthdays and anniversaries and going through wanting to quit and burn everything at least once, DO SOMETHING ELSE.
Just a few general comments:
1. There is no "blood, sweat, or tears" involved in residency. It is mostly just a job punctuated by frequent intervals of being tired and annoyed. Because residents, even with the 80 hour week, work for peanuts there in very little incentive for the hospital to become administratively efficient and you will therefore find much of your time spent wrestling with paperwork and other clerical duties which have absolutely nothing to do with the practice of medicine. Conservatively I would say that 30 percent of my time as a resident is completely and totally wasted, frittered away by a system that relies on brainwashed zealots to martyr themselves for the faith to save the hospital some money.
2. To say that people should be willing to sacrifice their families for the sake of This Mother****er is ridiculous. Times have changed, medicine has changed, and the people who go to medical school have changed. At one time in those far away Golden Days for which you yearn medical school was the exclusive domain of young single men. If we're going to turn back the clock let's turn it back all the way and exclude not only the married but women as well.
3. Consider the 72-hour week. That would be six 12-hour days with one day off a week. There is not one profession on the face of the earth that you could not master, and this includes brain surgery and rocket science, if you devoted 72 hours a week for five years to it. The idea that it takes 120 hours a week for five years to master anything is ludicrous. Medicine and Surgery are complicated but they're not that complicated. The fact that your hospital wants you to work 120 hours a week is a function of their desire to pad the bottom line, the cheap-by-the-hour labor of a couple hundred residents providing a comfortable cushion against the necessity to cover their services with well-paid professionals who, despite your belief in the altruistic nature of medicine, do not want to work for nothing.
4. "Continuity of Care" is a myth. Just another tool of The Man to try to shame you into keeping your mouth shut. On several services where I rotated as an intern and a second year, my job on call (every third day for three weeks with a week of night float) was to admit as many patients as was physically possible and I spent every night in the Emergency department doing history and physicals and orders for boring chest pains, abdominal pains, and vague psychosomatic complaints which are the bread and butter of modern medicine. It would not be unusual to admit fifteen patients a night and if you think there was any continuity of care you are mistaken. If we worked more hours the only difference would have been that we would have admitted even more patients. In other words, the extra hours would not be devoted to lovingly following a small group of interesting patients from admission to discharge but only in ramming more raw material into the patient processing mill that is the modern hospital.
Do you get that times have changed? My older attendings tell me that back in the day, they may have had a large census of patients on their service but as most were stable, long-term boarders (more like hotel guests than patients) their days and call nights proceeded at a more leisurely pace; it being one thing to have a couple of admissions a night onto a sleepy service full of patients for whom nothing much is being done but quite another to deal with ten or twelve admission a night onto a service full of what would have been considered critically ill patients twenty years ago but who are now extremely routine. Even our routine patients, you understand, would have been considered impossibly complex by the previous generation of physicans who lived at a time, not that long ago, when people routinely died of the first serious medical problem they encountered instead of living to accumulate a catalog of them as they do today.
Residents in the Good Old Days spun their own urine and made their own slides because they had nothing but time. Remember that in the 1950s and 1960S, the standard therapy for a heart attack was three weeks of bed rest in the hospital. Today you are home the day after your heart cath. Appendectomy? Back then you might spend a few days in the hospital before the operation and a week post-op. Today, oftentimes a same-day procedure. Not to mention that back then, a 97-year-old woman who stopped eating and began to choke on her food would have signaled the need for a priest and funeral home. Today we admit the lady, diagnose her with a stroke, ram a feeding tube into her demented body, support her in the ICU for a few days, send her to the floor for a few more days, and then place her contracted, eighty-pound body in a pre-death warehouse until the next time.
5. Medicine is "shiftwork" nowadays whether you want to accept it or not. You will find yourself admitting patients at 3Am as if it were the middle of the day and there is, at least at academic medical centers, no respite from the onslaught of patients, all of whom believe their particular problem is an emergency that must be dealt with right away.
