Why Does the VA Get So Much Hate?

[Adam Smasher]

Meme incoming

make one of an overgrown 5th toenail, call it the Battle of Little Big Horn, aka Cutter's Last Stand

 

[Feli]

...It would benefit the profession as a whole if we part away with VA sponsored programs.

Yep. Everyone knows this, but we don't have enough programs without them. And people want dean/prof jobs.
As soon as podiatry has enough - or any surplus - of residency spots for grads, they open more seats/schools.
VAs pod program were created to have enough spots and "everyone gets a surgical residency."

VAs are [now] ok podiatry jobs since parity pay, but they're inherently not good situations for training.
That is why the "good" podiatry VA programs are the ones that let their residents out for more cases/variety.
That is why MD programs (or DO programs) don't have any VA residency program sponsors and spend very little or no time rotating at them.
They also don't generally consider VA jobs as MDs, but podiatry has much more rugged job market and options.
One person's trash is another person's trea$ure.

 

[MicroPod]

The vascular surgeons at the VA we rotated at were seeing 1-2 patients a day in clinic and had on average 1 case a week likely making 2x more than the DPMs who were much busier. Sounds like a chill job for sure

 

[dtrack22]

Of course there are VA programs that offer better training than plenty of non-VA programs. But in general, they offer sub par training. There are 26 VA programs across the country. I can count on one hand the number of them that provide above average training. Why does the VA get hate? Because a majority of the people who have spent time at a majority of the VA programs witnessed awful training and reported said experience. It’s really not that hard, nor does it require two pages worth of comments to explain.