Residency hours

[jndelgado]

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Hi, I'm an undergrad and have wanted to go to medical school since I was in middle school. Being a doctor is the only thing I can see myself doing.

But what I'm worried about is the residency. I've made some mistakes, but now I have two beautiful children. I know I will be sacraficing a lot of time with my kids, but their dad will hopefully be helping me then.

So what I wanted to know is what is the work schedule like for a resident? I know there's a cap of 80 hours a week, but do you always work that many hours? And do you work that many hours for all 4+ years of residency? Do you have a choice on what hours you work? I know its typically 12 hours, but do you have say when those 12 hours are?

I was looking at a different website and listed residency from pg-1 to pg-8. Does that mean there's 8 years of residency? (It was a residency for pathology)

And any other information about residency that you can offer I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you 🙂

 

[DrAwsome]

Hi, I'm an undergrad and have wanted to go to medical school since I was in middle school. Being a doctor is the only thing I can see myself doing.

But what I'm worried about is the residency. I've made some mistakes, but now I have two beautiful children. I know I will be sacraficing a lot of time with my kids, but their dad will hopefully be helping me then.

So what I wanted to know is what is the work schedule like for a resident? I know there's a cap of 80 hours a week, but do you always work that many hours? And do you work that many hours for all 4+ years of residency? Do you have a choice on what hours you work? I know its typically 12 hours, but do you have say when those 12 hours are?

I was looking at a different website and listed residency from pg-1 to pg-8. Does that mean there's 8 years of residency? (It was a residency for pathology)

And any other information about residency that you can offer I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you 🙂

I think it's too early to talk about residency, when you are not even through medical school yet. Nevertheless, residency length varies from 3 years for most primary care residencies like IM, FP, peds, to 6+ for things like neurosurgery, plastics, etc.

Hours vary. You have lifestyle residencies, which are obviously tough to get, which can likely have 40-50 hours a week (Derm, for example) to grueling 80+ hours in things like surgery, medicine, etc. So depending on your specialty, your hours will vary.

Will it be difficult getting through med school with 2 kids? Sure, but it's been done countless times. I guess your family situation will also have a lot to do with it.

 

[gman33]

Years 3-4 in med school will have periods of terrible hours as well.
No real control over your schedule most of the time.

As above, residency varies based on your field.
Some are much easier than others.

Even the "easy" fields will have periods of terrible hours.
You could find a way to deal with it, but it will be tough at times.

If you want to maximize quality time with your family, I'd stay away from medicine.

 

[Law2Doc]

Hi, I'm an undergrad and have wanted to go to medical school since I was in middle school. Being a doctor is the only thing I can see myself doing.

But what I'm worried about is the residency. I've made some mistakes, but now I have two beautiful children. I know I will be sacraficing a lot of time with my kids, but their dad will hopefully be helping me then.

So what I wanted to know is what is the work schedule like for a resident? I know there's a cap of 80 hours a week, but do you always work that many hours? And do you work that many hours for all 4+ years of residency? Do you have a choice on what hours you work? I know its typically 12 hours, but do you have say when those 12 hours are?

I was looking at a different website and listed residency from pg-1 to pg-8. Does that mean there's 8 years of residency? (It was a residency for pathology)

And any other information about residency that you can offer I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you 🙂

I think the short answer is that while you won't be working 70-80 hours per week every week, you will be working those hours a lot of weeks in many specialties. Some specialties go above that -- the 80 hours is a 4 week average, not a cap. And no, you won't have a choice in terms of hours. The chief or PD will make up the schedule, and will try to make it equally painful for everyone. You may find you have a lot of months where you only have off 4 weekend days a month. You may find you are working nights 6 nights a week for 4 weeks at a time. There is no rule that days are typically 12 hours -- I'm not sure where you got that. There's currently an upper limit of 16 hour days for interns, and 24 for seniors. How many years residency is and whether things get easier as you move through it are specialty dependent, so once you know your specialty you can get a better handle on these things. Also bear in mind that a lot of this schedule is stuff you start getting exposed to in your third year of med school. A lot of us were q4 for a lot of our core rotations in med school, doing 24 hour shifts every 4th day. Also bear in mind that while the duty hours provide some more manageable duty hour ceilings, a lot of places don't make it easy for you to abide by those ceilings, and out of survival there will be people showing up a few minutes early and leaving a few minutes later than they are supposed to just so they aren't burning their colleagues or creating a bad impression.
So yeah, it's a lot to think about, too early to seriously think about it, but will absolutely require you to make a lot of hard choices. Because honestly residency is about as flexible as the armed forces -- you come and go when they tell you and really dont have a lot of say about it.

 

[Law2Doc]

...

Hours vary. You have lifestyle residencies, which are obviously tough to get, which can likely have 40-50 hours a week (Derm, for example) to grueling 80+ hours in things like surgery, medicine, etc. So depending on your specialty, your hours will vary.
....

bear in mind that many of the lifestyle residencies still require an intern year, which most end up doing in medicine. You won't be doing anything like 40 hours per week until very late down this path, give or take a few scattered electives.