Clerkship on call hours

[Thistimenextyear]

I am wondering to any current McGill medical students what the clerkship on call hours are like? If someone could specify how many hours or days are involved, I would appreciate it! I am a mature student with family and would like to have  an idea. Thank you!

[perle]

Hello! Med 4 here.

This is highly rotation/site dependent so it is a bit hard to answer. In general I found OB/GYN and ER had the most nights (like probably 4-7 calls over 4-6 wks.) Peds probably the most evenings (2 weeks of it) and other rotations like surgery and internal medicine have usually 2-4 days of weekend calls and 1-2 night calls over the course of 6 wks. Psych has no nights but some ER evening shifts. Fam med and geriatrics occasionally have day calls on the weekend but no evenings or nights. Electives are highly specialty dependent of course. Of note, calls are never at home i.e you have to be in house from time of evening signover to morning signover if you’re doing nights.

One thing to consider also is that even with no calls you never quite know when you’re going to leave (I found this particularly true of internal medicine where I probably worked 12-14 hour days for an entire week, depending on workflow.) The workload policy was changed in the past few months though so not sure about that anymore.

hope this helps

[Thistimenextyear]

 

6 hours ago, perle said:

Hello! Med 4 here.

This is highly rotation/site dependent so it is a bit hard to answer. In general I found OB/GYN and ER had the most nights (like probably 4-7 calls over 4-6 wks.) Peds probably the most evenings (2 weeks of it) and other rotations like surgery and internal medicine have usually 2-4 days of weekend calls and 1-2 night calls over the course of 6 wks. Psych has no nights but some ER evening shifts. Fam med and geriatrics occasionally have day calls on the weekend but no evenings or nights. Electives are highly specialty dependent of course. Of note, calls are never at home i.e you have to be in house from time of evening signover to morning signover if you’re doing nights.

One thing to consider also is that even with no calls you never quite know when you’re going to leave (I found this particularly true of internal medicine where I probably worked 12-14 hour days for an entire week, depending on workflow.) The workload policy was changed in the past few months though so not sure about that anymore.

hope this helps

Thank you! When you say 4-7 calls over 4-6 weeks you mean an average of 1 call per week? How many hours would the call be? Eg starting 9am Monday ending 9am Tuesday?  And for the evening rotations in Pediatric do they end at midnight? 

Again thank you!

[perle]

So 24 hour calls are not allowed in Quebec (unlike out west where I have indeed done them while on electives.) Generally you have the day off and night call will start anytime between 19:00 and 23:00. it will end around 8-9 am the following day and you get the rest of the day off.

For night calls: 

Ob/GYN: 1 week of nights and 1 week of evenings during a 4-week rotation. In addition, you have two weeks of outpatient OB/GYN for which there are no calls.

Peds: ~7-9 evening shifts over 14 days including 1-2 night shifts as described above. Evening was like 16:00 to roughly 23:00 if I recall.

ER: ~16 x 8-hour shifts including 2-3 nights.

Internal medicine: 1-2 nights during a 4-week ward rotation. I heard they may be taking the nights off the schedule though. Then 2 weeks ER consults for internal med (no nights) and 2 weeks on cardiovascular unit (no nights).

Weekend (day) calls and additional evenings for other specialties vary too much for me to remember ha! 

[perle]

One more thing to keep in mind: all residency programs (except maybe pathology?) have night calls because you end up doing a lot of off-service rotations in different specialties. This means family medicine has night calls in OB/GYN, internal medicine and ER for example.

[Thistimenextyear]

Thank you , very informative!