Night Float?

[sophiejane]

Those of you at programs with night float, how do you like it? If you've experienced both regular call and night float, what are the advantages/disadvantages?

Do you think whether or not a program has night float should be a major deciding factor for residency choice for someone with a family?

Thanks!

 

[endodoc]

Those of you at programs with night float, how do you like it? If you've experienced both regular call and night float, what are the advantages/disadvantages?

Do you think whether or not a program has night float should be a major deciding factor for residency choice for someone with a family?

Thanks!

Night float is good and bad.. I like it because I spend day with my family and go in at 7pm until 7:30am (approx). Bad, if you are on night float as a pgy2 or 3 and you have interns you are the one up all night with the pager on your head, and then doing their notes. If you luck out and have night flot in may or june with good interns life is nice.

 

[ekydrd]

Here it depends on the hospital you are in. I'm med-peds so I work in a children's hospital, the university hospital and the VA hospital. At the children's the night float only does admissions, so the whole team stays for crosscover crap (Q4 call). At the UH there is a night float team that covers everything 5 days a week so the team only stays over night on weekends (Q4 call but only one or two over night stays). At the VAH night float handles admissions and the long call intern stays to cover cross cover crap (Q8 over night call). Call at the U and VAH are pretty good, but at the children's it can be brutal if you get killed with admissions. Over all I like night float as it makes the work load a little less.

 

[kbrown]

night float is good b/c:
you get to go home a turn your pager off when you leave the hospital. i went to med school at a place where there was no night float and the residents were constantly receiving phone calls about their patients at night (all night) because they didn't sign out to the on call team. that totally sucked. so it's nice to walk out of the hospital at whatever time, and be done until the next morning.

night float is bad because:
a lot can happen in one 10 hour period. i don't know if you have ever experienced pikcing up a patient who has already been in the hospital for several days, and then you come in in the middle. it's pretty hard to get the full picture ever. so having night float can be similar. you patient could go down hill over night, you come in the next morning and don't even recognize your patient because of what transpired overnight. it can be hard to catch up on that stuff.

to me, night float=good. i would rather spend a few extra minutes in the morning trying to wrap my brain around whatever happened overnight, rather than be up all night dealing with it.

there is a happy medium, though. the program that i went to school at really sucked because they didn't have their residents sign out to the on call team, so they were ALWAYS on call (even post call, their pagers were on). But most places don't do it that way. When you leave you sign out your patients to your on call team and you are done with it.

But the reality is...I DON'T CARE. you can see by my signature that i am EM, so for me night float v long call v whatever, is really irrelevant.

just my two cents.........