Great post Feli. No more IHS??
Ya, it wasn't for me.
I think the VA/IHS stuff is fine if you "grow up" in that environment or are looking to relax at the "last job," but the lack of efficiency and no incentive to produce annoys you if you are accustomed to private podiatry/ortho/MSG and trained that way. I had too many mornings where I only got two cases done since the OR starts ~0800 and turnover is over an hour. It is an environment where seniority and networking (brown-nosing) the boss gets better hours and better pay... productivity is minimally considered. It almost seems like it is a contest among docs (and all staff) as to who can take the most days off for vaca/sick/conf, block their schedule for meetings, etc. That is encouraged by the govt setup because they still get the same pay regardless of whether they do 100 or 10 surgery cases per year and whether they see 7000 or 2000pts in office per year.
It was a cool exp and some interesting cases... and you save a lot of money due to the rural low cost and few things to waste money on, but it's not for everyone. I also think my girlfriend was ready to be back in civilization. Every location and supervisor is different, though... not a terrible place to get your numbers for boards and smash down loans, and for those who can look past the inefficiency, some locations might even be good enough for the long haul.
I will be going back to eat-what-you-kill setup in a large west DPM group/supergroup setup... can update sig link when contracting is final. I considered buyout of a solo retiring doc, but he had an emotional attachment to the office and wanted way too much for what it had produced lately (tale as old as time!). I also looked at another East supergroup and a SW conventional public
non-profit hospital job that paid well, but both had warts I didn't love. If anybody has their NM or NC license and would want those setups, they aren't bad gigs... I can pass along contact info in PM.
I tend to agree with you. In my experience even many pod attendings aren't up to date on which programs are good. I went to a historically very strong program that was below average to terrible in a lot of ways during my time there. The vast majority of the pods I interviewed with assumed my program was still as amazing as it was in the 80/90s...
Yes, this is a very key point.
Unless it's a program known to be dynamite, I always recommend attendings hiring grad residents look at the PRR case logs and possibly call the director. I just had a successful west coast PP doc text me yesterday, "hey, do you know anything about XYZ Chicago program?" It was a crap program (aren't 95% of Chi ones?), but he was screening a potential associate and I just suggested to him how to have the resident send him logs so he can evaluate that person or others. Sure, logs or the director discussion doesn't show you what the resident
can do, but it at least shows you what they were
exposed to. The logs are preferable since the director will be biased, but at least he/she can tell you what types of cases the program focuses on. After residency, they can just look for ABFAS BQ/BC or PLS logs primarily.
At the end of the day, it is a personal decision. You can't fake it in the OR once the time-out is starting. Do we want to be excellent at surgery or have a great CV? There are plenty of fairly average podiatry programs with a great Ivy league or well known hospital name associated, and some are adequate and some are junk. Fellowships are the same way... most of them add very little skill outside the top few, but it is a CV boost just to say "fellowship-trained." As you said, a HR person or MD might bite on the name Harvard or UPenn or Yale even though almost anyone in podiatry knows Preseby St Lukes or Dekalb or Grant are quite a bit better.
Conversely, there are plenty of programs with little name value outside podiatry (Detroit and Kentucky programs are probably best examples of that), and you will have done 500-1000 more procedures than the programs - yet you need to plan to push your case logs and explain your competence in most place.