hours in residency

[Guest Shahenshah]

would anyone know where I can find information on the average hours/week of the different residencies..for instance surgery seems to require 80-100hrs/week, family is 40-50hrs/week and so on.. (or could someone just speculate based on their elective experiences etc)

 

thanks!

[Guest moo]

You can try Iserson's Getting Into A Residency. There might also be something on the web.

[Guest Ian Wong]

I don't believe there is any one such source, simply because the answer is: it varies (tremendously).

 

The thing that surprised me when I figured it out, is that residencies are not individual streams. In other words, when you enter a Family Medicine residency, it's not like you disappear into the hospitals and clinics to do only Family Medicine rotations, and only associate with other Family Medicine residents. Instead, you do Obstetrics rotations (might be alongside the OB residents), General Surgery rotations (alongside the surgical residents), Internal Medicine rotations (along with the internists), ICU rotations (with the intensivists), etc.

 

For that reason, most residencies (irrespective of specialty) are going to have tough months when you are doing your required time in things like General Surgery or Internal Medicine, and their cushier months (if you spend time on Psych or rotations with no call like outpatient clinics).

 

The difference between some specialties having an easier residency versus others is the proportion of hard rotations to easy ones. In the initial years of your General Surgery residency, your "easy" rotation might be when you go to Internal Medicine or ICU for a couple of months. In contrast, those might be some of the hardest months for someone doing a Family Medicine residency. It's all relative.

 

Here's a very neat website put out by the AMA called the FREIDA website. All US medical students will use this site at some point when figuring out where to apply for residency:

 

www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/2997.html

 

One subset of this website is a section on Training Statistics. Within this section, you can click on any specialty, and get back information such as average number of hours worked per week, average number of days off per week, and all sorts of other employment statistics. That part can be accessed directly here:

 

www.ama-assn.org/vapp/freida/spcindx/0,,TR,00.html

 

Ian

[Guest Shahenshah]

thanx a lot guys..the website was exactly what I was looking for Ian!