What do surgical residents actually do day to day?
Started by xnfs93hy
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Depends on the level of the resident. What you do as a 2nd year resident is very different from a 5th year ("chief") resident.
Most of this information is not first hand. I've got a few friends that are various years into surgical residencies and I'll recount what I've gotten out of them.
The majority of the time in a surgical residnecy is not performing surgery, they'd love that, but managing your patient.
You have to assess your patient pre-op and ensure that all necessary tests are run and evaluated. You don't want your patient to die on the table due to an easily avoidable complication that you should have found out about. After surgery's complete, you have to make sure your patient recovers sufficiently that they can be discharged or transferred to their referring unit of the hospital.
The farther into your residency, the more you'll take the lead when you are performing surgery. I would expect that you are also more directly responsible for non-OR patient care as well, but the key point is that there are significant non-OR responsibilities for surgical residents (and attendings)
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Answering the OP's question is really complicated. It depends on the program, on the hospital, on the resident's seniority, and even on the particular service that the resident is rotating through.
At least at some places it works like this. Very junior surgical residents do a lot of running around the hospital answering pages and managing surgical patients outside of the OR. Slightly more senior residents spend more time in the OR assisting in surgical procedures. Very senior residents may be doing operations on their own. Surgical residency is many years long so the folks at the beginning and end of the process aren't really similarly situated.
From what I observed, it depended on the discretion of the attending surgeon they were assisting. If it was a simple procedure, then often the attending would allow the resident to perform most of the operation. With more complicated procedures (especially those that involved more than one attending surgeon), the resident took on more of an assistant's role (e.g. hold retractors, guide laparascopic camera).
Generally speaking, no. As a general surgery resident, you will be required to pre-round/round on your patients that are on the floors and/or SICU as well follow up on them throughout the day as necessary (i.e. if lab/imaging results happen to come in and if new orders need to be written). Residents will also usually have to cover the outpatient surgery clinic at least once a week.
I see. That's pretty cool.
It's interesting to see how differently things are done in other countries (like your examples of how things are done in Mexico) as compared to here in the US.
What do the hospitals in Mexico do for gynecological and orthopedic surgeries? And do general surgeons do GI surgery AND urology surgery, or are there specially trained urologists? And who administers anesthesia?
In the US, they don't rotate the ORs between different services, usually. But different OR wings are devoted to different specialties.
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