IM vs peds: worse call night

[Unsure2009]

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At my institution peds call night tends to be worse. Every kiddo who enters the ER gets a thorough eval. At least the medicine service caps at X number of admissions. Is this similar to other institutions? Even attendings have mentioned in passing that peds call is generally worse than medicine call. Any thoughts?

 

[Blade28]

From my MS-III experience, yeah, Peds call was worse - sick kids showing up to the ER all the time (though many didn't need to be admitted), and no caps like in IM.

And the peds nurses tend to call/page a lot more.

 

[Kubed]

IM call was worse for me. Not that the sick kids were any better, however the peds ER at my hospital is full of smoking hot nurses that get stuck on nights because they're new grads (read: not angry yet). Far more pleasant to visit the Peds ER than the adult side 😀

 

[The Buff]

Well, we didn't have overnight IM call at my school..but I can't imagine it would have been worse than the peds calls if we did. Those were the worst calls ever, worse than surgery for sure. Nothing is worse than a screaming/sick kid at 0400.

 

[vtucci]

IM Call was busier at TGH than Peds Call at TGH. However for our training it depends on the location of our peds rotation. Peds at All Children's was wicked busy by accounts from classmates. I, fortunately, had a nice experience at Tampa General.

Strangely, my busiest call so far was neuro weekend call at TGH. We could not get out of the ED the entire time.

 

[BigRedBeta]

First off I should say that my peds clerkship was a cluster...too much trying to be jammed into 8 weeks at the expense of inpatient experience. They somehow managed change the clerkship in the middle of this year, so I was in the last group to do it under the old system.

My one peds night was worse simply because I was on with an intern (an IMG, not that there's anything inherently wrong with them, but it compounded the issue) who had never been on call before - this was October mind you. We didn't get any pages after 9:30pm, but I still was up every 90 minutes calling into the ER just to make sure, because I didn't trust the intern to be okay on her own.

Medicine - I had great residents at the VA. They usually only wanted students to do 2 or 3 admits and they'd send us to bed. I only got paged once over the course of 4 overnights, to see a paracentesis done on a guy we were pretty sure had SBP. It was pretty perfect as we had just gone over SBP in our lecture series earlier that week.