Why Doctors Don't Take Sick Days - NY Times

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While Im glad the author acknowledged that there isn't really a pool of people to take up your slack, I think she overstated how infectious people tend to be when they stay home. Most of the time when you feel really bad it's because it's your immune system mounting a response to something you were spreading already for several days. As such that may be when you are least infectious. Theres also the ability to significantly limit spread of most germs with masks and gloves and hand washing, so the need to be home is sometimes exaggerated for things like the common cold. Ive seen people in other fields sty home for extremely mild noncontiguous things out of ignorance. There's also a culture in certain specialties not to let down the team by being sick that play in.
 
It's silly because the author says, in part, that it's due to bravado and that doctors think that they can't succumb to illness. That's not true at all. The reason we don't call in sick is because that's how we're trained and until the training system changes, that's how it will always be. It's a totally different mindset. Most people in America think nothing of calling in sick, or even using sick days for time off when they're not actually sick. Most people couldn't conceive of having vacation time "left over" at the end of the year. And most people would never accept it if their job said "oh, when you're done with the work day, you're also working overnight. And don't forget to show up tomorrow, too."

I once had a patient who woke me up at 2 AM during residency with some idiotic complaint. I actually handled it politely until he said "this hospital is lousy (because it took me ten minutes to get to his room), you call this customer service? If I ran my car dealership like this, I'd be out of work in a month." I said "great, I'll be at your dealership at 2 AM tomorrow." And those are the same people who yell about how doctors are overpaid, by the way. Even if we didn't know way more than them, the hours alone would justify the salary.

P.S. Don't bother writing a comment about how arrogent that sounds. It won't bother me in the least.
 
welcome to doctor culture

lol @ substitute doctors. i guess you pay them a certain amount a day to be kept on retainer and pay them extra when they actually come in.

another idea is to have a midlevel fill-in, but then again you might be giving them too much autonomy which might backfire when they want to practice independently
 
Law2Doc said:
They have this. It's called moonlighting.
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Locums is probably a better analogy, but then you're stuck looking for some random person who happens to have a state license and then you need time to get them hospital privileges, even if you can accelerate the process. Neither of those are good answers for someone who is randomly calling out sick that day.
 
PrideNeverDie said:
welcome to doctor culture

lol @ substitute doctors. i guess you pay them a certain amount a day to be kept on retainer and pay them extra when they actually come in.

another idea is to have a midlevel fill-in, but then again you might be giving them too much autonomy which might backfire when they want to practice independently
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Call works like this at a lot of hospitals. Get like 1K per call day, extra for whatever cases that come in.
 
Wordead said:
Call works like this at a lot of hospitals. Get like 1K per call day, extra for whatever cases that come in.
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No, that has nothing to do with call. Call is call, not fill-in for someone who is sick.
 
-hey honey i am feeling sick today
-humm okay, so what you are going to do
-i am going to the hospital
 
ruralsurg4now said:
No, that has nothing to do with call. Call is call, not fill-in for someone who is sick.
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Call means a lot of different things. What he's referring to is 'backup call': you're not responsible for patients/admits, but you do have to be sober and within a certain radius of the hospital so they can call you in if someone is sick. Most good groups have a backup call system. Many just disperse the backup call evenly over the entire group, but some incentivize it so that you can get paid for days of backup call and someone people will take more than others. Also you'll get to be on backup call often as a resident: they don't pay you anything extra for that, you just get to spend your day off sober and close to your work.

Its less common in fields with smaller groups, of course. A three man surgery/heme-onc practice can't have a backup call system nearly as easily as a 30 person hospitalist/ED group.
 
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Law2Doc said:
While Im glad the author acknowledged that there isn't really a pool of people to take up your slack, I think she overstated how infectious people tend to be when they stay home. Most of the time when you feel really bad it's because it's your immune system mounting a response to something you were spreading already for several days. As such that may be when you are least infectious. Theres also the ability to significantly limit spread of most germs with masks and gloves and hand washing, so the need to be home is sometimes exaggerated for things like the common cold. Ive seen people in other fields sty home for extremely mild noncontiguous things out of ignorance. There's also a culture in certain specialties not to let down the team by being sick that play in.
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Or they just don't feel good and want to take one of their sick days to rest. They might not be contagious, but feel like crap, and thus call in to not go to work.
 
Perrotfish said:
Call means a lot of different things. What he's referring to is 'backup call': you're not responsible for patients/admits, but you do have to be sober and within a certain radius of the hospital so they can call you in if someone is sick. Most good groups have a backup call system. Many just disperse the backup call evenly over the entire group, but some incentivize it so that you can get paid for days of backup call and someone people will take more than others. Also you'll get to be on backup call often as a resident: they don't pay you anything extra for that, you just get to spend your day off sober and close to your work.

Its less common in fields with smaller groups, of course. A three man surgery/heme-onc practice can't have a backup call system nearly as easily as a 30 person hospitalist/ED group.
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Fair enough, but with backup systems, it's usually the same issue. People try at all costs not to impose on the backup and similarly most people -- whether they admit it or not -- that are backups sort of assume that they're not going to be doing much on the call. Either way, though, I still see call as call.
 
KnuxNole said:
Or they just don't feel good and want to take one of their sick days to rest. They might not be contagious, but feel like crap, and thus call in to not go to work.
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That assumes they have an allotment of "sick days" to use. That's not the case at most programs. They do this at the expense of others who have to pick up the slack.
 
Law2Doc said:
That assumes they have an allotment of "sick days" to use. That's not the case at most programs. They do this at the expense of others who have to pick up the slack.
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Oh really? I thought every program had certain amount of sick days for residents...😕
 
the main reason not to take sick days as an MD is your colleagues who will have to drop their day-off plans to come in will think you're a giant pansy.

we have all seen residents/attendings working full call days with nearly bursting appendices etc etc so unless you have a condition that needs emergent surgery calling in sick is a dbag move.
 
e30ftw said:
the main reason not to take sick days as an MD is your colleagues who will have to drop their day-off plans to come in will think you're a giant pansy.

we have all seen residents/attendings working full call days with nearly bursting appendices etc etc so unless you have a condition that needs emergent surgery calling in sick is a dbag move.
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Does pregnancy count? :poke:
 
e30ftw said:
the main reason not to take sick days as an MD is your colleagues who will have to drop their day-off plans to come in will think you're a giant pansy.

we have all seen residents/attendings working full call days with nearly bursting appendices etc etc so unless you have a condition that needs emergent surgery calling in sick is a dbag move.
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e30ftw said:
the main reason not to take sick days as an MD is your colleagues who will have to drop their day-off plans to come in will think you're a giant pansy.

we have all seen residents/attendings working full call days with nearly bursting appendices etc etc so unless you have a condition that needs emergent surgery calling in sick is a dbag move.
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It has nothing to do with them "thinking you are a pansy". It has to with most programs being short staffed and so your colleagues have to pick up the slack, maybe impacting their own schedules and hours, maybe having do do less savory tasks/rotations that it was your turn to do. Which is reasonable if you are actually incapacitated, but not so reasonable if you have a cold. You mask and glove up and go to work if you are able, so as not to screw over your co-residents.

Every one of the posters will be on the co-resident side of this issue at some point in their career. I doubt many will feel, no biggie, I'll happily miss this important event I was planning on attending for weeks because Bob has the sniffles and I have to stay late and do his job...
 
it is just a really bad system that won't be fixed because the short supply of doctors keeps the salaries high

if we train a lot more doctors, our lifestyle will be better but our salaries will be lower too
 
PrideNeverDie said:
it is just a really bad system that won't be fixed because the short supply of doctors keeps the salaries high

if we train a lot more doctors, our lifestyle will be better but our salaries will be lower too
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You apparently don't know how the job market works. If you want to train a lot of doctors -- and, by the way, good luck figuring out how to do that, since you can't just double the number of residents or medical students and they magically all get educated -- and drive down salaries, then nobody will want to be a doctor. If you asked every doctor on this forum "would you work for $75,000, assuming you could only work 4 days a week?" they'd all laugh at you.
 
Perhaps I'm a wuss...but I have taken (gasp) two sick days in residency.

Now granted, on both of these days I had no inpatient care responsibilities, was not on call, and did not screw over any of my co-residents. I've also worked plenty of days while sick because I was on call. I haven't resorted to getting IV boluses or anything although some of my friends have.

Both involved some sort of gastroenteritis.

One of the days, I was supposed to be in surgical oncology clinic. The attendings were quite in agreement with me that I should not be there. No one wants to see a new oncology consult with a resident who is having to run to the bathroom every ten minutes.

The other day I was supposed to be scoping. The attendings don't really mind if we miss scope days, because they can easily do them solo and end up having an early day...
 
southernIM said:
Now granted, on both of these days I had no inpatient care responsibilities, was not on call, and did not screw over any of my co-residents. I've also worked plenty of days while sick because I was on call.
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That's the point. You decided when to call in sick based on how much it affected other people, not based on your own sickness. That's the culture of medicine that I was alluding to.
 
ruralsurg4now said:
That's the point. You decided when to call in sick based on how much it affected other people, not based on your own sickness. That's the culture of medicine that I was alluding to.
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I prefer this to the alternative. Everywhere I have worked in the corporate world there has always been one or two hypochondriacs that seemed to spend more time out of office (at the doctor) than actually working. When they were in the office everyone had to hear about how miserable they were because of their diseases (usually fibromyalgia and "the sugar", accompanied by any number of other things.)
 
ruralsurg4now said:
It's silly because the author says, in part, that it's due to bravado and that doctors think that they can't succumb to illness. That's not true at all. The reason we don't call in sick is because that's how we're trained and until the training system changes, that's how it will always be. It's a totally different mindset. Most people in America think nothing of calling in sick, or even using sick days for time off when they're not actually sick. Most people couldn't conceive of having vacation time "left over" at the end of the year. And most people would never accept it if their job said "oh, when you're done with the work day, you're also working overnight. And don't forget to show up tomorrow, too."

I once had a patient who woke me up at 2 AM during residency with some idiotic complaint. I actually handled it politely until he said "this hospital is lousy (because it took me ten minutes to get to his room), you call this customer service? If I ran my car dealership like this, I'd be out of work in a month." I said "great, I'll be at your dealership at 2 AM tomorrow." And those are the same people who yell about how doctors are overpaid, by the way. Even if we didn't know way more than them, the hours alone would justify the salary.

P.S. Don't bother writing a comment about how arrogent that sounds. It won't bother me in the least.
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It's not arrogant it all. It's strikingly accurate. The medical profession in other developed parts of the world treat it more like a normal job, with normal work hours during residency, time off, maternity/paternity leave, and more reasonable incomes. The training system in America treats it like hazing in a fraternity or the marine corps. Now excuse me while I deviate from the topic to a rant for a moment... to be a part of the "club" you have to be willing to give up things that a unionized or even typical exempt worker couldn't even imagine. And by "club" I mean the system that is setup to guarantee artificially inflated remuneration and a standard of living a couple of sigma beyond that of similarly educated and trained professionals in other career paths subject to normal labor market forces. It's like, deep down in everybody's mind, they know it's bull**** how much we get paid, and if they see a peer having to endure less than they do for their carrot, then they push that guy out. This is the reason why the hazing is endured. It's remarkably childish and won't end until the mechanism that drives people to become doctors not just to become well off, but actually wealthy through labor alone (whereas this is only possible in virtually any other common walk of life only by making risky investments) falls apart, which it is slowly starting to do. It should not be possible to work one day a week as a dermatologist and earn a high standard of living nor should it be possible to work as a radiologist for 10 years and retire. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by establishing a system (fee for service not paid by the consumer) that encourages people who desire to be lazy and feel entitled to semi-retirement after finishing training, nor those who finish training and only care about "moving meat" as much as possible ethically or otherwise. This is, of course, only my opinion after enduring 4 years of disillusionment by elitist and insincere medical students increasingly being concerned with becoming a member of the upper class. Being part of a stable, respected, middle-upper class profession is increasingly left in the dust as people are, years before their first job, already planning the communities they will live in, private schools they will send their children to, other things they will do to portray their image, and how they will manage to do this ONLY on their combined $400,000-600,000 per year MD couple income. :vomit:
 
I think you're overestimating the value, real and economic,that other professionals provide to reach income levels that parity physicians. Or, you are underestimating the value that physicians services provide.

I'm sure an exec will gladly accept your terms, however. 100k W2 for you and a mass of revenue for them - feel better now?

That is sure to fix everything. Now that I think of it ... why didn't you just become a nurse?


thefritz said:
It's not arrogant it all. It's strikingly accurate. The medical profession in other developed parts of the world treat it more like a normal job, with normal work hours during residency, time off, maternity/paternity leave, and more reasonable incomes. The training system in America treats it like hazing in a fraternity or the marine corps. Now excuse me while I deviate from the topic to a rant for a moment... to be a part of the "club" you have to be willing to give up things that a unionized or even typical exempt worker couldn't even imagine. And by "club" I mean the system that is setup to guarantee artificially inflated remuneration and a standard of living a couple of sigma beyond that of similarly educated and trained professionals in other career paths subject to normal labor market forces. It's like, deep down in everybody's mind, they know it's bull**** how much we get paid, and if they see a peer having to endure less than they do for their carrot, then they push that guy out. This is the reason why the hazing is endured. It's remarkably childish and won't end until the mechanism that drives people to become doctors not just to become well off, but actually wealthy through labor alone (whereas this is only possible in virtually any other common walk of life only by making risky investments) falls apart, which it is slowly starting to do. It should not be possible to work one day a week as a dermatologist and earn a high standard of living nor should it be possible to work as a radiologist for 10 years and retire. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by establishing a system (fee for service not paid by the consumer) that encourages people who desire to be lazy and feel entitled to semi-retirement after finishing training, nor those who finish training and only care about "moving meat" as much as possible ethically or otherwise. This is, of course, only my opinion after enduring 4 years of disillusionment by elitist and insincere medical students increasingly being concerned with becoming a member of the upper class. Being part of a stable, respected, middle-upper class profession is increasingly left in the dust as people are, years before their first job, already planning the communities they will live in, private schools they will send their children to, other things they will do to portray their image, and how they will manage to do this ONLY on their combined $400,000-600,000 per year MD couple income. :vomit:
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I won't mind taking a sick day here or there. Everyone get sick. And they want a day or two or rest. Perfectly 100 percent ok. That is why they give us sick days, can't let them go to waste 😉
 
ruralsurg4now said:
That's the point. You decided when to call in sick based on how much it affected other people, not based on your own sickness. That's the culture of medicine that I was alluding to.
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That's cause it surgery 😛

That would be a depressing culture to work with. I call in sick bAsed on my sickness, so does everyone else. I take their clinic calls and admits and they do the same for me. Kinda like scratch each other back sorta thing. Yeah it sucks that you have an extra add on in the office or you have to admit a sick residents patient, but you'll be happy when you are sick and/or want a rest day and someone will cover your booty 🙂
 
yappy said:
I think you're overestimating the value, real and economic,that other professionals provide to reach income levels that parity physicians. Or, you are underestimating the value that physicians services provide.

I'm sure an exec will gladly accept your terms, however. 100k W2 for you and a mass of revenue for them - feel better now?
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Neither of these. Rather I think you are overestimating the value that many physicians provide and drastically oversimplifying the way that money spent by patients, benefits providers, and welfare programs finds their way to physicians.

In regards to "overestimating the value, real and economic,that other professionals provide to reach income levels that parity physicians." Really? Well it's certainly true in terms of corporate lawyers and bankers, who are pretty much the only other common professions where you can earn similar amounts strictly for labor (i.e., without investing in your own business or something and relying on a paycheck from someone else). What value do they provide? One increases the cost of doing business for virtually everyone by making things needlessly complex and the other is basically a gambler who produces no real tangible good and repeatedly ruins the lives of millions when their bets go bad. And of course, in both of those lines of "work" there is no guarantee that simply by having such a job you will have a such an income like there is in medicine. But they are not who I was referring to. In reference to "similarly educated and trained professionals in other career paths subject to normal labor market forces," I am referring to scientists, engineers, businessmen, project developers, etc. who have masters or doctorate degrees and are employed in the private sector by corporations that actually make products of real value. You know, the types of career paths that most of your parents probably have (if they are not doctors) and many of your college friends will have. These people are intelligent, educated, hard-working, and make up the majority of the white collar workforce's middle management. Across virtually every industry, these people earn salaries with few options for additional income, and these salaries max out in the $150,000 range. I'm not determining their value at all. The job market is. Physicians are exempt from this. Politicians determine their value (again, not I, and in this case, not the market). These politicians are lobbied by (surprise), doctors. The result is completely arbitrary and insane valuation. The natural defensive comeback to this from money-hungry premeds and med students will be "but we have so much debt, we need more money than those other guys." To this I say (1) check your arithmetic, and (2) even 20-30 years ago, when med school was actually affordable and debt levels were minimal, doctors still earned far more than anyone else (in fact, far more than they even do now). The increasing tuition and debt is a result of the education system trying to get a piece of the pie and charging more because they can because the borrowing limit has been raised over and over again. This is a totally separate problem.
 
southernIM said:
Just playing devil's advocate here...A culture in which you consider the impact of your actions on others, and weigh the relative importance of your own needs versus those of others is "depressing"?
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I meant more like "if someone thinks about taking a sick day, they'll be ridiculed." It might make people hesitate due to fear of backlash. I agree that if it's something small and you know you have a lot of clinic patients or you know you'll be on call, you could try to suck it up. But, like you said too, it's pointless to go to work if you are puking every 10 minutes or look like you are two seconds away from passing out.

Also in terms of missing events and staying extra late, I assume people are talking about calls right? Cause I can't think of anything that would make someone work extra late if someone called in sick. Unless I'm forgetting something...
 
KnuxNole said:
That's cause it surgery 😛

That would be a depressing culture to work with. I call in sick bAsed on my sickness, so does everyone else. I take their clinic calls and admits and they do the same for me. Kinda like scratch each other back sorta thing. Yeah it sucks that you have an extra add on in the office or you have to admit a sick residents patient, but you'll be happy when you are sick and/or want a rest day and someone will cover your booty 🙂
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It's definitely worse with surgeons, I agree, but it's still true to some extent to other specialties. Obviously, people who are outpatient-based in practice tend to have more of a "call out sick, no problem" mentality. I think it basically depends on who is around to cover for you. At the hospital I left, the medical intensivists worked while they were sick (just colds and things like that), generally because they were a relatively small group that was alreadly a little stretched thin to start out with.

To southernIM: Responding to the devil's advocate position, it has nothing to do with a quasi-Marxist "consideration of the needs of other before my own" mentality. There are so many flaws with that way of thinking, such as the position that by coming to work sick, you're increasing the risk of infecting other workers and patients -- so actually, if you considered the needs of others you would call in sick "selfishly." Additionally, we are not some collective where one works until they literally drop dead "for the greater good" and then some other hive worker steps in to continue. Nor would I ever want such a world, even if it sounds pretty on paper. (By the way, although it may sound contradictory, neither should we be like unionized America and demand to be paid for time we don't spend working, but that's another issue.)

My main point is that IF you believe that doctors work while sick, then blame the system we train in because it forces us to think that way. We feel guilt when we put work on others. That's just how we are. I tend to be someone who would work while they were sick, unless I was incapacitated, of course. Because of that, those are also my expectations for my peers, at least for surgeons if not for other physicians. As KnuxNole said, we're messed up like that. The good thing is we're all messed up the same way, so our standards are essentially the same and there isn't too much problem with that expectation as a result.
 
KnuxNole said:
I meant more like "if someone thinks about taking a sick day, they'll be ridiculed." It might make people hesitate due to fear of backlash. I agree that if it's something small and you know you have a lot of clinic patients or you know you'll be on call, you could try to suck it up. But, like you said too, it's pointless to go to work if you are puking every 10 minutes or look like you are two seconds away from passing out.

Also in terms of missing events and staying extra late, I assume people are talking about calls right? Cause I can't think of anything that would make someone work extra late if someone called in sick. Unless I'm forgetting something...
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Well there's a pretty clear difference between puking every 10 minutes and just being sick and feeling tired/weak. I know I'd be pissed if I had to pick up someone else's slack. And we all know people that abuse being "sick" and taking time off.
 
That is a good point. Knowing someone who has a lot of stuff happening who calls in sick for a minor thing can tick off people, I can see where people are coming from with that. Also, maybe I'm thinking about it differently based on different specialties in terms of how much "slack" you pick up when someone is sick. Or perhaps I tend to think too optimistically and failing to see the main issue...then again I've only had to cover for someone once for sick day, so I probably have to wait till I'm seasoned 😛

On a "worst" day, if a co-resident who I am assigned to cover calls in sick, I would have to see their admitted patients, admit their patients to the hospital if they need admission, take their office calls, have their patients added on to my clinic schedule if they were in office at the same time, and do their call night(which might end up resulting in me switching call with them so it works out). Assuming they aren't on call, the time I would leave the hospital wouldn't change regardless if they use all their sick days or not. Perhaps I'd had to come in earlier to round, which I agree could be annoying if you get told last minute you have someone calling in sick.
 
KnuxNole said:
That is a good point. Knowing someone who has a lot of stuff happening who calls in sick for a minor thing can tick off people, I can see where people are coming from with that. Also, maybe I'm thinking about it differently based on different specialties in terms of how much "slack" you pick up when someone is sick. Or perhaps I tend to think too optimistically and failing to see the main issue...then again I've only had to cover for someone once for sick day, so I probably have to wait till I'm seasoned 😛

On a "worst" day, if a co-resident who I am assigned to cover calls in sick, I would have to see their admitted patients, admit their patients to the hospital if they need admission, take their office calls, have their patients added on to my clinic schedule if they were in office at the same time, and do their call night(which might end up resulting in me switching call with them so it works out). Assuming they aren't on call, the time I would leave the hospital wouldn't change regardless if they use all their sick days or not. Perhaps I'd had to come in earlier to round, which I agree could be annoying if you get told last minute you have someone calling in sick.
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If you cover all their stuff, how is it that you don't leave the hospital any later? Or is this the 80 hr rule in effect? And whats your specialty?

I guess I just assumed it'd be like being a med student - when someone called in sick, the rest of us got saddled with extra patients to do progress reports/H+Ps (which took longer if they were new patients since you had to review all their crap), and thus we had less time to study / went home later. And pissed us all off.
 
Not necessarily the 80hr rule. I'm in family medicine, in an unopposed program(so it's only FM residents). For example, a co-resident had two patients in the hospital and called in sick, he/she told me they are calling in sick, so in addition to the pre-rounding I would be doing for the service I'm on, I would see those 2 patients(I come in earlier than usual anyway), check out to the FM service senior with those 2 patients, follow them along the day(labs, nursing calls, seeing them on the floor to check on them) and check out to the on call resident at 5. I wouldn't necessarily leave later because there are extra patients. Same with clinic patients. I might have add-ons from residents who called in sick, but they won't overbook me. I would agree with the "less time to study" part with extra notes to write, extra admits to do, and extra patients to see in the office.
 
KnuxNole said:
Not necessarily the 80hr rule. I'm in family medicine, in an unopposed program(so it's only FM residents). For example, a co-resident had two patients in the hospital and called in sick, he/she told me they are calling in sick, so in addition to the pre-rounding I would be doing for the service I'm on, I would see those 2 patients(I come in earlier than usual anyway), check out to the FM service senior with those 2 patients, follow them along the day(labs, nursing calls, seeing them on the floor to check on them) and check out to the on call resident at 5. I wouldn't necessarily leave later because there are extra patients. Same with clinic patients. I might have add-ons from residents who called in sick, but they won't overbook me. I would agree with the "less time to study" part with extra notes to write, extra admits to do, and extra patients to see in the office.
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Two patients isn't really that bad. Plus, if he called you, he'd probably give you a pretty good sign-out, since he's leaving you holding them.
 
Wordead said:
Does pregnancy count? :poke:
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Pregnancy seems to count for everything since everyone is so afraid to tread on the pregnant woman's toes for fear of retaliation
I had someone in Residency arrange her ICU rotations in a certain part of the year & then have a planned pregnancy with due date around that time - D-bag move for sure
Others have to pick up the slack for that but usually there is no payback since the mom is then out for maternity leave
Ideally take a year off to have your kid so you don't burden everyone else in your program
 
ruralsurg4now said:
To southernIM: Responding to the devil's advocate position, it has nothing to do with a quasi-Marxist "consideration of the needs of other before my own" mentality. There are so many flaws with that way of thinking, such as the position that by coming to work sick, you're increasing the risk of infecting other workers and patients -- so actually, if you considered the needs of others you would call in sick "selfishly." Additionally, we are not some collective where one works until they literally drop dead "for the greater good" and then some other hive worker steps in to continue. Nor would I ever want such a world, even if it sounds pretty on paper. (By the way, although it may sound contradictory, neither should we be like unionized America and demand to be paid for time we don't spend working, but that's another issue.)
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I was obviously being somewhat contrarian 😉

But in all seriousness, I have some good friends in internal medicine. Their residency has a built in "jeopardy" system to cover emergency absences. My residency (gen surg) does not because we only have 6 residents per year so there is not enough redundancy. I much prefer our system. A small subset of medicine residents abuse jeopardy to the extent that the jeopardy resident is constantly covering their worst services, on little notice. I have covered for one of my colleagues but it was for a true emergency, and I did so happily.
 
When I was doing my pediatrics rotation as a resident we had a large group meeting (all peds and FM residents) and the Children's hospital advisor told us how wonderful it is to have us and that our health is the most important and to "heal thyself"....

She left the room and they made sure the doors were shut when the chief resident started to address us. "If you get in a car accident, and you loose both legs and an arm..Use the remaining arm to drag yourself to pre-round. Understand?"

That is of course an over statement - but the point is made. If you do not show up due to whatever, SOMEONE is going to pick up slack - someone who is probably overloaded/overstressed already and who will not be compensated. If you go out repeatedly for stupid things, you will not only have trouble making friends- you will likely have coworkers who wouldn't move a finger to help you.

On the other hand, if you are a hard worker who only takes days off for serious reasons - then you will likely have people tripping over themselves to help you! I once helped a coworker who had an amazing work ethic take 2 days off as a close family member had passed. I ended up working 15 days in a row, but it was worth it and I would think he would've done the same for me.
 
southernIM said:
I was obviously being somewhat contrarian 😉
Click to expand...

I know that.

I went to an even smaller residency than yours, so basically if someone was sick, it would really mess up everyone's day with covering cases and call. By the way, what's with the "IM" in your name?
 
styphon said:
When I was doing my pediatrics rotation as a resident we had a large group meeting (all peds and FM residents) and the Children's hospital advisor told us how wonderful it is to have us and that our health is the most important and to "heal thyself"....

She left the room and they made sure the doors were shut when the chief resident started to address us. "If you get in a car accident, and you loose both legs and an arm..Use the remaining arm to drag yourself to pre-round. Understand?"
Click to expand...

I don't think I could see a pediatrics resident saying that. Did she at least put down her teddy bear before she said that? 🙂
 
ruralsurg4now said:
I know that.

I went to an even smaller residency than yours, so basically if someone was sick, it would really mess up everyone's day with covering cases and call. By the way, what's with the "IM" in your name?
Click to expand...

From the south...unrelated/non medical nickname and didn't think about the implication when I signed up.

Bu now it's fun to confuse people...
 
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