Like many of my colleagues, I teach and supervise students, residents, nurses, and respiratory therapists. I’m also the medical director of a PICU. Overall, I’ve been teaching and doing administration for over 30 years. And, like most of my colleagues, I never received any formal instruction at all in how to do these things. To some extent I got help from my own mentors, primarily by watching what they did, …
Reward or punishment in medical training
I don’t like selecting colleagues through the Match. The process was established to allow students to get the best opportunity available and I feel that our program (and our patients who rely on our trainees to provide care) is in jeopardy every year. It always turns out better than I anticipate, so I shouldn’t complain. However, we have to interview 60 prospective residents to fill our six slots so …
Advice to prospective family medicine residents
Every medical student is a bit apprehensive when he/she knows they will be assigned a new resident. The same questions always come up. Will the resident be nice? Will they understand my busy schedule? Will they make me do a ton of scutwork? Will they make me write all of his/her progress notes? And maybe most importantly, will they let me leave early to study for boards or enjoy the …
The 3 types of residents that medical students will encounter
I got home recently after a 14 hour day in the operating room with (predictably) a pair of really tired feet, which lead me to think about shoes, foot rubs, and the fact that no one ever talked to me about this in my training.
What kind of shoes should you wear in the hospital?
There’s a lot of walking in the hospital, but there’s even more standing. Running shoes don’t provide …
What kind of shoes should you wear in the hospital?
The average week for a medical resident training in Mexico can easily exceed 90 work hours. Mexico is a country that takes pride in offering full health coverage for 100 million citizens. This is a new policy and free public medical care is being pushed to the limit. The situation is simple, the work load in outpatient clinics, operating rooms, the wards and emergency rooms across the country is …
The life of a medical resident in Mexico
Here’s the scenario. It’s Friday evening. You’ll be back at work on Sunday. You’re sleep deprived because you are a resident. You haven’t spent any quality time with your significant other, friends or family because you haven’t had any real time off. Next week has plenty of call and it would really help if you planned out good food for the week and cooked something. And, by the way, …
How medical residents should spend their time off
“Code Blue ICU … Code Blue ICU”
I was greeted by the PA system as I walked into the hospital this morning. A shiver ran down my spine as I quickened my pace . The days of running to codes are long gone. But since I have a patient In the ICU I was curious and just a little bit worried.
As I walked through the sliding doors I passed the room …
How real life medicine is less glamorous than residency
An excerpt from This Won’t Hurt A Bit (and other white lies): My Education in Medicine and Motherhood. Copyright © 2011 by Michelle Au. Published by Grand Central Publishing.
Let’s look at this first purely from the perspective of personal investment and expectation. To practice medicine, …
Why do people decide to become doctors anyway?
I just finished another inpatient service stretch at our community hospital with some great cases and lots of good medicine. While attending rounds may have changed a lot in the last 40 years as highlighted in a recent Annals of Internal Medicine article, some things have not changed – the focus on medical student presentations during attending rounds.
Students spend hours through their call nights preparing for …
How medical students should present patients to their attendings
I’ve made some fairly outrageous claims about the workload of a neurosurgical resident recently. Seems like a reasonable time to lay out exactly what a day on call can be like for me and my fellow residents.
To be fair an average experience may be hard to articulate. Different rotations and different days yield different … adventures. Right now I’m on a service that could hardly be called grueling, but I …
A neurosurgical resident’s typical day
This month of my intern year, I am covering night float for the private hospital. Compared to the massive county hospital teeming with laboring patients, churning at all hours of the day and night, the private practice pace is meant to be a luxury for interns seeking respite. And for the most part, life has been pretty nice.
This week however, has been nothing less than hell. One night, I was …
Medical resident superstition and black clouds
At a recent meeting I attended, a vigorous discussion broke out about what medical students, residents and attendings should wear, and more importantly what they should not wear.
Interestingly, patients have been asked to weigh in on this discussion. What to wear is also on the mind of many current second year medical students who may find themselves trying to take study breaks from USMLE 1 to go buy …
What residents and medical students should wear in the hospital
Patient handoffs increase the risk of medical errors.
As I wrote recently in USA Today, as residency hours are restricted, more of these handoffs will take place. It’s imperative that this source of error be minimized.
Vineet Arora, associate director at the University of Chicago’s Internal Medicine residency, is one of the nation’s authorities on patient handoffs. She recently made a video for the incoming interns about the …
Patient handoff video that every medical intern needs to see
On a recent Saturday, I rounded in the hospital. I met up with Zainab, the president of the minority premed association for the University of Chicago, who asked to shadow me. While she was doing research at the hospital, she had not ever rounded in the hospital before. It was Saturday so our team was mostly off so it was just me and my very capable resident who is about …
Tips for students who want to shadow doctors
What is “MRI Abuse”? This is when the health care provider orders MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) in excess or for the wrong reasons. There are many causes of MRI abusive behavior but most evolve out of a significant misunderstanding of how to properly utilize this diagnostic tool. MRI imaging has a high sensitivity to detect anatomic abnormalities, does not expose the patient to high doses of radiation like a CAT …
MRI abuse can be dangerous and expensive for patients
My husband and I recently traveled to Wuhan Medical School in the Hubei Province in central China.
Our medical school has partnered with Wuhan to help inform their curricular reform efforts. We spent 4 days touring the hospitals and teaching facilities, meeting students and faculty, going on rounds, and giving talks. Although the language barrier was challenging, we had incredible translators who worked to translate every slide we spoke …
China medical school and residency training
by Dr. Whoo, MD
I have met several women who have completed residency and maybe even practiced beyond that, but decide to quit and stay at home with kids. I wonder – why would a woman who has gone through all of that training just quit? It would seem like the hard part is behind them and I am perplexed by their decision but, of course, I …
Family comes first for some who have finished residency
by Dr. Whoo, MD
Q. I just found out last week that I’ll be a new mom in November, making me an official mother in medicine! I’ve been reading the blog for a while, because I love hearing what all of you have to say about your lives. Here’s my question: What tips would you give for surviving residency while pregnant, especially 30-hour calls (without caffeine)?
— From a future mom and …
Medicine residency survival tips during pregnancy
Early last year, my boss Talmadge King and I were at an ABIM meeting (we’re both on the board), and the group was debating a controversial topic. Another participant at the meeting, like Talmadge the chair of a prominent department of medicine, said, “We polled 250 people at our grand rounds last week, and they said ‘X’.” The audience gasped – ‘X’ was a completely unexpected …
How to make your medical grand rounds thrive
The following is part of a series of original guest columns by the American College of Physicians.
by Steven Weinberger, MD, FACP
At times of calendar transitions, e.g., at the onset of a new year or a new decade, the popular press often takes a broad view in looking retrospectively at the outstanding or defining events and people of the past …
ACP: 10 major challenges that confront medical education over the next decade
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