Incompetent Intern

[Tired]

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You military guys are such rock stars.

Yeah, but that 65lb pack gets pretty heavy in the long spine cases . . .

 

[USArmyDoc]

I can't believe an MS3 is complaining about the opportunity to see patients and take responsibility, formulate plans, and have someone actually care what their opinion is. With minimal consequences if you screw up (your resident and attending get the consequences since no one expects you to know what to do). This is an amazing learning opportunity. Take advantage of it.

I was thinking the samething. I am hoping I get the opportunity to do this much. On the other side of the coin, I would rather have a competent intern teaching me and guiding me.

 

[VFTW]

Although I don't want to get him in trouble, I also don't want to have to leave the hospital at 6pm every day. I feel so frustrated!

You're complaining about leaving the hospital at 6pm? 😱

Tell me you're joking.

On rotations where I have good interns, I leave at 6p. On rotations that are short-staffed or with large censuses where I take a more intern-ish role, I'm lucky to leave by 8p.

 

[AF_PedsBoy]

No, the other resident is very good but he is super busy taking care of a ton of things. I don't know any medical student who works 4ma-7pm.

That was my schedule when I did surgery at AGH, so yes there are other MSIIIs with the same schedule.

The good news is when he becomes an intern and only has to work 80-90 hours a week he'll be saying, "This is a vacation!" Your Break Is Only One and a Half Years Away!

 

[fang]

to the OP: I'm going to take a guess and say you're likely not as useful as you think you are. Even an incompetent intern is probably better than an MS3. If you left the team tomorrow, the work would still get done-- maybe late (since this intern is inefficient) and maybe by other people, but it will get done.

I think you probably derive some much-needed confidence from looking down on this struggling intern... as a medical student you often feel useless and irrelevant, so it must be great to complain about picking up the slack for someone else.

 

[climbingdocs]

No, the other resident is very good but he is super busy taking care of a ton of things. I don't know any medical student who works 4ma-7pm.

How much longer do you have left? You can do it. 😀 Human being can do anyting for 2 months. I understand your frustration man. BUT I promise you it's better to acutally do something, feel usefull, then just drag behind intern who doesn't let you do crap. I did internal med once, and had intern work by himself cause other intern was on vacation. My intern wanted to take day off, so on Sunday I saw all the patients by myslef (14) took me forever, but I felt good about myslef. 😀 You should be proud of yourself that you can do all this stuff as a 3rd year. 👍

 

[LoveDO]

I'd just count the days left til it is over. I had a similar experience and just dealt with it and read up on stuff on my own since the intern was teaching us wrong stuff. Not worth rocking the boat in my opinion since it's a probably only a 4-6 week experience.

 

[snowhite]

What to do? I'm currently on a rotation where the intern is very incompetent. We basically have to do all the work of the resident and he's always asking us to do his work. He makes frequent mistakes, the attendings hate him, and the other residents also dislike him. He's frequently late, spends all day doing who knows what, but at the end of the day, notes that have not been written by the students are pretty much left unwritten, patients orders have not been made, and so forth...

Whoa - where are you rotating at? This describes this one intern perfectly at my hospital.

I didn't get a chance to read through the whole thread, but the only thing I could do was suck it up and do the work. In the end, the residents acknowledged what was going on and saw me favorably. Some of the residents had to do the intern's work too so they were all too familiar with what was going on.