How Do I go about reporting an abusive program ? Can someone report the the program who is not a resident there?
my boyfriend started a IM residency program and they work over 88 hours ( more like 110 hours) limit per week and the attending even call them on their " days off" to come in . he is working from 4 am to 10 pm every night and he still hast to finish notes till 1 am . repeat everyday. He won't report it since he is on a visa and scared that would ruin his position.
Your BF should be highly encouraged to report the violation. He's going to be at the program for 3 years so it's better if any issues can be improved or solved sooner than later. There are a lot of malignant IM residency programs out there, especially the ones that are filled with IMGs since they are the easiest to take advantage of. Better report earlier since fixing most ACGME violations takes a lot of time since they don't just involve the program and the IM department; it involves other departments in the institution like hospital administration or ancillary staffing. In many cases violations occur because a program its sponsoring institution has limited financial resources to adequately cover services , and as a result is understaffed and with other staff such nursing/PAs/NPs. Since residents aren't paid on an hourly basis, it's "convenient" for programs to pull residents to fill in the gaps.
As mentioned in the post above, the best way to report the program is through the ACGME (
ACGME > Residents and Fellows > Report an Issue > Office of Complaints). The ACGME accredits nearly all the residency programs in the U.S. and can but programs on probation or shut them down.
For the ACGME to take the complaint seriously, it has to claim a violation of a common program requirement, either one that applies for all specialties or one specific to IM residency (
Common Program Requirements)
It sounds like violations are occurring at his program from what you're describing,
so he should not hesitate to report it. The ACGME has a policy of keeping the reporter anonymous (they won't reveal the identity of the person filing the complaint to the institution) so they shouldn't know who made the claim unless the person gives personally identifying details.
Also, it may be helpful to look up the program's accreditation history (publicly available info on ACGME website) to see if there are any warnings that would suggest the program has had ACGME violation issues in the past. It probably would've been even better to research this why applying through the Match to avoid ranking programs with history of ACGME issues.
Also,your BF will need to ask his resident administration for the programs annual ACGME Program Survery data. The ACGME sends an annual survey on these compliance issues that at least 70% of residents in each program is required to fill out anonymously (it wasn't administered in 2020 due to COVID). It asks the residencies to rate how complaint programs are with various ACGME rules (eg 80 hr work limit, carrying no than 10 patients per day as an intern or 20 patients per day as a resident) and then ranks all the programs in a given specialty against each other based on the survey results of residents. IMO the ACGME should make these survey results publicly available since they provide key information for prospective applicants that can be used when ranking programs and helps to identify potentially malignant programs.
