Lifestyle of the Oto resident

[snoopdizzle]

I was just wondering how many hours oto residents work. I hear it varies widely from place to place with the more intense academic centers making residents work harder. What's the call like? When does the typical day end? Just curious.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[Bollinger_MD]

Depends on the structure of the programs. There isn’t a standard across all residencies because of the many factors that impact this including but not limited to:

1. Call schedule (in-house v home, how often, trauma coverage, etc.)
2. Number of hospitals and geographic area covered and impact on commute times.
3. Conference schedules
4. Size of resident cohort and distribution of workload
5. Efficiency of hospital system overall
6. EMR platform used

Ultimately, you need to talk to a resident that is actively training in a residency program to find out what they have experienced because it can change rapidly even for individual programs.

 

[MediastinalTrach]

I will counter your first point by saying I went from a middle of the road medium sized program (3 a year) to a top tier large sized program (4 a year) for fellowship and the residents seem to have a higher quality of work life balance. This augmented by the fact that they have several inpatient and outpatient PAs which handle the bulk of the day to day annoyances.

 

[HighPriest]

As mentioned: highly variable with a lot of factors involved. Very hard to quantify globally. Better to look at individual programs.

Here’s the thing; it’s not about being busy. It’s about quality of education.

You can be really busy doing medicine and surgery or you can be really busy doing scutwork. You can be at home by 5 and learn nothing or you can be at home by 5 but have had a high yield day.

But if you can choose, you want to be really busy doing medicine and surgery because that’s why you’re in residency. Once it’s over, you gotta figure it out on your own, and that’s FAR easier if you saw and did a lot as a resident.

A lot of med students are really caught up on how bad their life is going to be in residency, but like most things there’s a cliche: you’re going to get out of it what you put in. And unless they were at a particularly malignant program most people that I’ve spoken with look back fondly on their residency experience even if they were busy. Hindsight is pretty weird that way.

 

[SkullbaseFoLyfe]

Highly variable as previously mentioned. And unfortunately - VERY difficult to ascertain as a med student.

Im a resident at what is traditionally thought of as a very busy top ranked program. My life as a PGY1-2 was fairly painful for approximately 4-6 months of those years (6am-8/10pm) on most days. HOWEVER, due to being at a large program with many sites, there were a good amount of 'chill' rotations (5pm is the norm, if not the extreme). And the change between junior and seniors years has been absolutely astronomical. My call schedule as a senior resident is almost as good as it gets (approx 1 weekend call every 2 months). And most of my weeks are also fairly relaxed - AKA do cool stuff in the OR and go home right after.

Honestly the most important thing is finding a place where you fit in well with the residents. These are the people who are going to be your 'family' for 5 years. The long days werent bad because I was surrounded by friends.