1. Yup guaranteed for the remainder of residency. Not many people leave.
2. Absolutely! The primary care program director here was one of the founders of SGIM, so the program is actually extremely influential and well established/well published. As such, it tends to attract a lot of very qualified applicants. Each year the PC residents are generally very good (We've had moments where the Tisch ICU was run entirely by PC residents!) and they're honestly indistinguishable from categorical residents. I've heard many people describe it as a very "touchy feely" program which I think is one of its major draws! Lots of support, lots of guidance, and a lot of camaraderie between people in the program. There's also a lot of crossover between the two tracks (every year there are a bunch of people who switch into the PC track and occasionally there are a few who switch into categorical). The administration is extremely supportive of whatever you want to do, whether it be fellowship or straight PC (it's about 50/50: fellowship/general practice every year with the majority of fellowships being General Medicine, GI,Heme Onc). The vast majority of people who come out of the PC track go into academic general medicine, as the pathway tends to prepare you best for this career track.
3. Yup! I've had ambulatory time (4+2 scheduling is AMAZING btw). My clinic is in Bellevue and I love it! (people generally like Bellevue a lot here). They tend to start you off slow, so in the beginning when you're building up your census you tend to see maybe 1-3 patients in the afternoons, but then afterwards as R2s and above, you can see upwards of 5-6 and maybe 10 on a full day. People rarely leave past 5pm though (I've actually never seen it) as your attendings in the clinic tend to go to great lengths to make sure you are out at a reasonable hour (oh also half days every week and 2 day weekends make life so much better!). Inpatient census can be up to 10 for an intern, but I've honestly never seen anyone carry this many as an intern, because you'll usually have sub-interns help pick up some of the slack (med students here are really, really good and very eager to learn). The most I've seen someone carry is maybe around 7-8 and if that ever happens (I've only seen it maybe 1 or 2 times), the majority of your census will be chronic patients that don't need much monitoring and are really only in the hospital awaiting placement.
4. Yes, morning report and lectures are absolutely accessible if you want to go to them. I've never, ever had trouble going to educational events and I think one reason for this is that intern and resident reports are separate, so that when you do go to intern report, you hand over your pager to the resident and they take care of everything for the hour that you're away. I've never seen an intern that was so swamped they couldn't make it to morning report (granted there are some who choose not to go but this is an entirely different issue altogether
).
5. At Bellevue and Tisch, almost none. The program leadership has gone to GREAT lengths to cut down on the amount of scut interns have to do (as a resident this is especially true at least later on in the year). At Tisch, obviously nurses are great and you don't have to do any scut unless you choose to. At Bellevue, we have dedicated teams now that come frequently throughout the day to do things like blood draws (The only time I've ever done my own blood draw at Bellevue was by choice, when I wanted to practice doing blood draws haha). The VA is different though, because nurses there are not allowed to draw certain labs (like VBGs for instance) so there's no escaping there, but it's honestly not bad at all. I think the amount of scut you do is really more resident dependent than anything else. The residents I've had have all been really good and have shielded me against unnecessary scut, basically volunteering to do things like fax forms and obtain collateral so that I could focus on more important things. This may be largely due to the fact that R2s and above don't need to write progress notes (as attendings are required to write notes on everyone), so they have more time to sit and think about patient management.
-As an aside I just wanted to mention that before coming here I really bought into all the talk about how scut-acular the NYC resident experience was, only to find that it really was not any worse than scut from the private hospital I rotated through as a med student. I think this may partially be due to expectation (my expectations were so low that I was pleasantly surprised when the level of scut was much better than I expected), but I really think this is largely due to administrative changes and improvements. We have a multitude of PDs and administrative staff who are all very, very responsive to resident suggestions and really take quality of life very seriously. I've already heard from people one year above me how much better the interns have it now compared to last year. Granted that's just one person's opinion so take that for what it's worth.
so, in essence, will you be a NYU Primary Care track resident graduating with a NYU categorical track diploma while using NYU Lutheran as your primary clinical site?
