Peds residency with young children at home

[Deleted member 1077394]

I'm a lady nontrad closing in on my late 20s and considering having more children sooner rather than later.

My SO and I are hoping to have a baby during my gap year before med school (my application year).

My primary concern with this plan is having enough time with my child during residency, especially intern year. If we were to do this and it works (barring fertility issues, etc.), the little one will be 4 during my intern year. I don't want to cause separation anxiety issues by never seeing my child or not being home at a predictable time. If I know anything about kids that age, it's that they need structure and routine.

I'm currently an educational professional and see myself in Pediatrics or possibly Family Medicine. Of course, this is program-dependent, but what's an approximate sign-out time for the busier rotations in Peds residency? I am thinking my SO would have to take care of dropoff and pickup, but I'd really like to have some playtime and do the bedtime routine, so I'd ideally like to be home at 7 pm at latest. Do most programs have a night float system to avoid 24-hour call?

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[mvenus929]

I don't remember any peds residency that I looked at that still had 24 hour call for most rotations (a couple still had it for PICU, which is 2 months of out residency). My program, sign out was 6a and 6p. Depending on the workload, some people could potentially leave earlier and generally on your clinic day you also got to leave earlier. PICU had earlier sign-out (like 5-5:30 depending on census), but you could leave as soon as work was done as long as you weren't the late stay person. We did have rotating 24 hour shifts on weekends, so once or twice a month you'd work a 24 on Saturday.

 

[Deleted member 1077394]

I don't remember any peds residency that I looked at that still had 24 hour call for most rotations (a couple still had it for PICU, which is 2 months of out residency). My program, sign out was 6a and 6p. Depending on the workload, some people could potentially leave earlier and generally on your clinic day you also got to leave earlier. PICU had earlier sign-out (like 5-5:30 depending on census), but you could leave as soon as work was done as long as you weren't the late stay person. We did have rotating 24 hour shifts on weekends, so once or twice a month you'd work a 24 on Saturday.

This was really helpful. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond.

 

[RespectTheChemistry]

I don't remember any peds residency that I looked at that still had 24 hour call for most rotations (a couple still had it for PICU, which is 2 months of out residency). My program, sign out was 6a and 6p. Depending on the workload, some people could potentially leave earlier and generally on your clinic day you also got to leave earlier. PICU had earlier sign-out (like 5-5:30 depending on census), but you could leave as soon as work was done as long as you weren't the late stay person. We did have rotating 24 hour shifts on weekends, so once or twice a month you'd work a 24 on Saturday.

Hi - If you have a moment to answer another question, may I ask about fellowships? Do the ICU fellowships tend to have generally similar hours to those of residents at the same institution? Do fellowships still have 24-hour call? I don't want to feel pigeon-held into General Peds if I find a subspecialty I prefer.

This may be a silly question; I'm learning! For a middle-of-the-road applicant, how realistic is it to try to match in a particular city (Chicago in our case)? Both of our sets of parents live in the Chicago area and having retired grandparents around offers an extra layer of available childcare.

 

[mvenus929]

Hi - If you have a moment to answer another question, may I ask about fellowships? Do the ICU fellowships tend to have generally similar hours to those of residents at the same institution? Do fellowships still have 24-hour call? I don't want to feel pigeon-held into General Peds if I find a subspecialty I prefer.

This may be a silly question; I'm learning! For a middle-of-the-road applicant, how realistic is it to try to match in a particular city (Chicago in our case)? Both of our sets of parents live in the Chicago area and having retired grandparents around offers an extra layer of available childcare.

This is going to be wildly variable depending on the fellowship (and different for pediatric specialties than adult specialties, for others who may be reading). I only have experience with Endocrine fellowship, and we don't do in house call at all, and our calls are typically very reasonable. I have a friend who did GI fellowship at a large Children's Hospital and they had someone take home call on the weekends during rounds because otherwise the inpatient fellow would be unable to actually do rounds because there were so many calls, but very few of them actually required you to be present.

I imagine PICU and NICU do more traditional call, but I don't know if they still do 24 hour calls. Hospitalists I think do night float.

Hard to say, but Chicago has a lot of residency options for the full spectrum of competitiveness. Lurie is well respected and more competitive, but the smaller programs or the ones in the suburbs are going to be less so. But I had zero interest in Chicago, so I didn't even bother applying so can't tell you much more than that. I imagine you have a reasonable chance if you apply to all the programs in the city and surrounding areas.

 

[RespectTheChemistry]

You're the best! Thank you so much, @mvenus929 ! Perhaps I am behind the times, but you must be getting pretty close to finishing fellowship if I recall correctly (or maybe already finished?). Congratulations either way.

 

[mvenus929]

You're the best! Thank you so much, @mvenus929 ! Perhaps I am behind the times, but you must be getting pretty close to finishing fellowship if I recall correctly (or maybe already finished?). Congratulations either way.

I start seeing patients as an attending next week First time I've been back on SDN since graduation, so I have to go change all the statuses now...