See their website for more information:
About the Program — Cafe Loggia
It may not be malignant in the traditional sense, but they do take advantage of the Prelims more than the Categorical interns and so it ends up being a very busy year for the prelims (they know that Prelims are only there for1 year so they have little incentive to keep them happy). Notably, the Prelims do about 6-8 weeks more of inpatient floors than the Categoricals. This happens since the Categoricals are required by ACGME to go to continuity clinic so they have 12-14 weeks of outpatient ambulatory clinic per year, but for the Prelims they instead use most of that time to have them cover the inpatient floors. The inpatient floor blocks obviously work much longer hours than the outpatient blocks (averaging 75-80 hrs per week as opposed to only 25-30 hrs per week on outpatient blocks) and is also where there is the most scutwork occurs. While not exclusive to NYC programs, expect to be doing your own blood draws, drawing ABGs, faxing papers for medical records, calling offices to make discharge appointments for patients, and having to go with monitored patients off the floor to get imaging tests done.
Also, note in addition to covering the standard teaching hospitalist service patients, about 20% of the patients are private patients ("private" patient means that the attending physician for the patient has essentially no teaching affiliation with the residency program, but has admitting privileges at the hospital); there is virtually no teaching from private attendings and they just have you do the scutwork for them (that at most other programs they would either have to do themselves or pay out of pocket to hire PA/NPs do to). Their IM residents have previously also been expected to cover the Neurology service patients in the past, but this may be changing since they are starting a Neurology residency program. Obviously the IM residents there are not thrilled to cover private patients and Neurology patients (expect maybe for the small handful of prelims each year that are going into Neurology).
But I would avoid doing Prelim year at any NYC program altogether, unless you have significant personal or family reasons to be there. You have to deal with super high COL and none of the NYC prelim programs are cush. Your friend may be referring to the Categorical IM program at Lenox Hill (which isn't really cush either but the schedule is more reasonable than the Prelim) or comparing it with the very malignant NYC programs.
