internships

[dancote]

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Is the internship year structured the same for all specialties, or would a surgical be different than a family practice for example? I want to do fp and am trying to learn what the different years of schooling entail. I have a family with young kids and want to know that I'll be able to balance school with family ok.

Thanks for any description or help!

-Dan'
pre-DO
Marquette MI

 

[Seaglass]

It's different for different specialties.

There are 3-4 different varieties. Some specialties (Anes, Rads, PM&R - I think, etc) don't start until your 2nd year after graduation (post-grad year 2 or "PGY-2"). At the same time you apply to these programs (4th year of med school) you are applying to programs for your intern year. These can take 1 of three forms:

Medicine Prelim: You are an intern in an internal medicine residency program. Your schedule is similar to the "categorical" (read- matched for 3 years) interns (MICU, floors, clinic). After your 1 year you leave to go on to your regular specialty. Popular with Rads, Anesth, etc.

Surg Prelim: similar to the medicine setup but you are doing what the surg folks do (round on floors, do clinic, cover trauma, occasionally see the OR). Often necessary for Neurosurg, Uro, ENT, etc.

Transitional Year: The cush intern year if you do it at the right place. This is much more of the traditional "rotating internship" where you do peds, OB, medicine, surg, etc with usually quite a bit of elective time. Because hours and schedules tend to be a bit better than either of the above these tend to be more competitive.

Now, if your program does not start in the PGY-2 year (and examples of ones that don't would be Peds, most EM, Med, FP, Gen Surg, OB) your intern year is basically just rotating through all the services of that specialty. So obviously the difficulty of it is based on the a) specialty, and b) hospital you are at. For example, surg may be nasty at one hospital and mostly bearable at another. Or an EM internship may involve Neurosurg ICU, Trauma ICU, PICU, MICU at one place but only one unit month at another. So it really depends on the residency.

Since you posted in FP I'll let one of them answer, but overall in my experience FP internships tend to be like the transitional year - you do a bit of everything.

C

 

[dr.smurf]

seaglass is pretty much right on. the fp intern year is very comparable to the transitional year in that you do a little bit of everything. now the cush part probably depends on where you end up, but since fp internship is year 1 of your residency you have lots of responsibility for the service pts. you are just like an IM resident when you are on floor months. there are 6 months of floors where i am. call is q3 or 4 with nightblock coming in at night (9pm) so its not that bad. you do traditional 24 hr call on wknds when nightblock resident is off. when your off service (away from the fp inpt serv) the other rotations are shift work like ob and er is all shift work where i am. peds call is q4 for us but this is just two months. the other difference is that your first yr in fp you will see your clinic pts one half day a week.

in general the 1st yr of fp is the busiest as you will find with most residencies. fp is lots of fun and if you like variety and a broad knowledge base then go for it. best of luck..