Thoughts on resident workload

[Entirecropslost]

I was just curious what others experiences have been with oto residents workload. I mean it has the reputation of being a cushier specialty, yet the residents at my school work pretty hard. Residency is hard....i know i know, but I would say oto works harder than any non-surg specialty and harder than other specialties such as OB. I know it varies school to school and probably by region, but at my school they get their at 6 and usually stay until at least 6. Take call from home which means they could potentially be there all night and then all day the next, I guess most of it is because of head and neck, but I donno the whole atmosphere seems somewhat high stress to me. Of course you can't really talk about this with residents so I thought I'd ask people on this forum.

 

[medstylee]

oto residency is definitely no joke. on our head & neck service we round at 6AM and lately some of us have been staying till 7 or 8PM at night on a daily basis. we work hard. not all of our patients go home the same day. we have some very complicated patients - huge H&N resections with free flaps, withdrawing from alcohol for days in the ICU... they are a lot to deal with.

 

[OHNSresident]

Yep, that sounds about right for your average Head and Exploding Neck service. There can be high levels of variability outside of head and neck, however. Head and neck patients, emergent airway (esp peds airway), and the bane of our existence - epistaxis - tend to ensure that we Oto residents are usually doing something.

With that being said, I still think there is a big difference between us and Gsurg. I thank my lucky stars regularly that I did not choose that route. IMO, we offer more comraderie and compassion to one another, and it is considered normal to do so. Not that all Gsurgers are robots, but they definitely seem to be a different breed to me. Plus I have had some of them tell me they wish they choose Oto. I have never met an Oto resident that has wanted it the other way...

 

[Entirecropslost]

I guess once you get out of residency you can have a pretty nice lifestyle if you choose, but I guess I assumed the residency was a little easier, especially with home call. But I've come to find that the only reason they have home call is so they can stay until the next day. I could just see the mental exhaustion on this one resident who didn't sleep all night, and was still with us the next day at 8:00, I couldn't help but ask myself what have I gotten myself into, it's residency I know, but not getting to go home early after call just sucks. I guess what gets me too is the fact that one of the reasons they get no sleep is at our hospitals they are consulted for absolute b.s. I'm talking not being able to see in the back of some kids throat, if there is anything remotely unusual around a trach, calling for rec's when you already typed them up in your note, ect. Still love it, but just a little disheartened I guess.