Hi,
I'm a 2nd year resident at ACH in Little Rock. I am glad you are still considering us as a potential choice. I do not know much about the Miami progam, but I can answer specific questions about the Arkansas Children's program. In comparison to LSU Shreveport, you will see more tertiary care and referral stuff at ACH. This is good and bad. Sometimes on wards months it feels like half or more of your patients are subspecialty (GI, Endocrine, ID, HemeOnc, etc.) and not enough good old general peds stuff. The flip side is that you get to interact and be taught by all these pediatric trained subspecialists, not just an adult GI who sometimes does kids too. Please know coming into our program, we do ALOT of ER time in the intern year. Some current interns did not fully understand this and are not happy because of this. I personally like the ED (hoping to do a fellowship in Peds EM) - the reason I like the ED is because we get most of our procedures there - tons of LPs, suturing, splints, etc. I also like the multi tasking.
As pediatric residents, we are very well treated. Everyone gets pocket PCs with in hospital wireless connections - I can check my labs and radilogy reports while I am sitting in morning report! We also have an administration who is responsive to the needs of the residents - ie now having nurse practioners on the ward teams, repainting the intern call rooms, instituting a ward admit/night float system where on most call nights I got 4-5 hours of sleep and still went home by 1pm post call. Another difference b/w Shreveport is that a free-standing hopital for children, everything is made for pediatrics - from the wagons to goto radiology to the bright colors to the nurses and techs who choose less salary to work in a peds hospital because they love what they do. It does make a difference in the overall experience for the patients.
No program is perfect- ours is no exception. We do work hard - especially in the intern year. Again, lots of ER time, wards months, one term nursery month and one neonatology month. But, by comparison to the other places I interviewed, we worked efficiently ie night float, home by 1pm, NPs. I have a life at home with my wife and daughter, and if I stay off SDN, I could have enough reading time too. Second year is great - lots of outpatient months with regular 8:30-4:30 clinic hours, 2 neonatolgy months, one month of PICU (today is my day off), and electives. Third year is supposedly more work than 2nd year, but not nearly like first year. Another complaint from some of us is the Morning report/ noon conference schedule. They can be hit or miss depending on the person giving the lecture. What the PD has done is buy everyone a board review book and change the lecture schedule from random topics to grouped lectures ie I read about GI in my book or Nelsons and for those 2 weeks the GI docs give the noon conferences with a board review session at the end. Also all topics will be covered every 1 1/2 years not every 3 years, so if I miss a lecture series because I am on an outpt month, I will see it again before I finish. Again this plan is supossed to start next July - we already have the books, but we will see how it works.
Anyway, I have now rambled for half an hour (yep, I type incredibly slow). Overall I would choose to come here again. Little Rock is a good city, very affordable (you can buy a house). I would feel prepared to do general peds or to go onto a fellowship (we have people do both every year).
Pleae feel free to continue this thread with questions.
Have fun making your decision - and once that is done, enjoy the hell out of 4th year.
