shadow attending or resident

[meatbone1]

I'm taking the 'plunge' and contacting Emory University's Department of Emergency Medicine.
There are no individual email addresses listed under the Resident section, however more of a list serve.
In addition, I could contact the Program Director and ask for shadowing opportunities.
Would it serve me better to shadow an attending or a resident?

 

[student1799]

Usually in an academic hospital, the residents are the ones doing most of the work and seeing patients.

This is 100% true, which is why I would recommend shadowing a resident. Also, it will give you a great window into what we'll all be doing (hopefully) a few years from now.

As for the idea of shadowing an attending, maybe it's possible, but I've honestly never seen anyone doing it. (I volunteered at a teaching hospital for 2 years in a clinical research program for students, and I was able to shadow 12 residents over that time.) Attendings are incredibly busy, and I doubt they'd really want someone tagging along after them. The residents, on the other hand, were really nice about it.

 

[justdoit31]

Good luck- I shadowed some of the Emory physicians in Peds Hem/Onc and it took 6 months of paperwork to get me in (a friend has shadowed one of the ER docs though and it wasn't as bad!)... I think either is good (I shadowed both attendings and fellows)- I felt like I got great info from both sources. The fellows were more talkative and interested in you being with them but the attendings have a lot of teaching experience and taught me a ton! I went with one of the attendings to her lab and she took me to dinner it was awesome- I should mention that attending is the friend of the family I nanny for so it wasn't a random call/email.

 

[mynamehereMD]

Check to see if the schools you are going to apply to accept resident shadowing as "shadowing". For instance, University of Utah does not accept resident shadowing.

 

[jtimmer1]

I shadow an orthopaedic surgery resident, but he is usually with attendings during surgery, so kind of both.

 

[theacks1]

It's the freaking ED, all kinds of attendings and residents and medical students will be running in and out of rooms all night.

I've been shadowing in our Peds-ED for almost 4 months now, and I've probably followed 8 different attendings and 18 of the 22 pediatric PGY-1s and PGY-2s into patient's rooms. Of course, I tend to gravitate toward specific ones, and they are probably the ones I will ask for recs, but it is great to see each one handle the same situation in different ways.

To give a more sober answer, I'd highly recommend working with both attendings and residents. Obviously, if you go into emergency medicine, you will spend most of your life as an attending, so it is best to see what it is like to be an attending, but you will also spend 3-6+ years as a resident/fellow, so it is a good idea to spend some time with them too. They will most likely be the ones doing most of the history gathering, which is a crucial skill to learn, and any experience you gain in that is wonderful. But honestly, if you are officially shadowing an attending and he is typing up a chart and a resident gets up to see a new patient, I highly doubt anyone will give it a second thought if you get up and follow the resident into the room, or the nurse taking a fetal heart rate, or the neurosurgeon giving a consult, or the urgent care physician suturing a split lip, or the medical student going to the Rads resident's room to get a read on a CT, or anyone else who happens to find their way into the ED. I specifically e-mailed the Peds EM chief, so he was able to officially give me the freedom to do whatever I wanted (legally), but even if you don't have that direct permission, I'm sure you will do fine. I'd recommend going to the top, and then schedule yourself around a specific attending/resident if you want, but I doubt it is necessary; most physicians are actually pretty nice about sharing you 😉. And if you click with one of the residents and think he can give a wonderful letter, great. If you can get a rec from both an attending and a resident explaining things from their particular view point, even better.