Residency Hours

[SouthernSeafood]

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I have been a long time lurker but decided to post a few questions to this great forum.

For some reason, I have been under the impression that Family Medicine residency generally is less intense than many other specialties. I've been interviewing recently and many of the residents are commenting about how for almost all of intern year and many months during 2nd year they are working 80 hours a week.

I am not afraid of hard work but was fairly surprised by this. Is it the norm?

 

[deleted87716]

That's pretty much the norm as an intern, when the bulk of your rotations are inpatient and the on-call requirement is heaviest. Things usually improve pretty significantly in the second and third years, however, once you start doing more ambulatory months and electives. Many programs allow their senior residents to take call from home, as well

 

[VA Hopeful Dr]

Yeah, for call months expect to work 70-80 hours, depending on the program. That might change for next year with the new rules, but I doubt it.

 

[JustPlainBill]

Monthly average of 76 here -- only reason it's down is we have slow rotations where we hit 36-50 hours a week....

inpatient months are more like 76h qweek; just finished covering one of the weeks over christmas for someone on vacation -- 96 hours -- we got slammed with unassigned admits and some rather beefy inpatient problems....it sucked...

If you're thinking FM is cushy -- maybe as an attending or 3rd year, but not for the first two.....Oh, and don't believe the lie that only people with low board scores (i.e. you don't have to be smart or have a lot on the ball) go into FM -- you have to KNOW standards, treatments, and at least handle the garden variety problems of other specialities as good, if not better, than they do.....I had two ortho residents comment on how rough we have it as FPs with all the evidence based medicine we have to know....received the same comment from a pediatrics attending.....

 

[SouthernSeafood]

Thanks for all the responses.

Where I did my Family electives had a night float system in place, maybe that accounts for the difference.

 

[JustPlainBill]

Thanks for all the responses.

Where I did my Family electives had a night float system in place, maybe that accounts for the difference.

Since you brought it up---we have a night float system in place also for our inpatient.