Show respect for how hard your interns and residents work

As we age, we look back and convince ourselves that we were better and worked harder than the current generation.  Dr. Gurpreet Dhaliwal addressed this issue beautifully in an essay – The Great Generation Today’s trainees are every bit as professional, motivated to learn, and devoted to their patients as previous generations. Students and residents follow duty hours but then log on from home to monitor their patients, write orders, and stay in touch with their on-call colleagues.7 They come to the hospital on their mandated days off for family meetings. They connect with their patients despite unprecedented paperwork, computer work, and throughput. And yes, they are on their smartphones constantly—reading about medicine, texting colleagues to coordinate care, and talking with patients’ families. While I agreed strongly to this essay, many remained skeptical.  One of recent chief medical residents just published a study that confirms the above thoughts. Trends in Inpatient Admission Comorbidity and Electronic Health Data: Implications for Resident Workload Intensity In the era of duty hour regulations, there is increasing concern regarding resident workload compression. We conducted a retrospective, observational assessment of all internal medicine resident admissions to a Veterans Affairs hospital over a 15-year period to evaluate several admission components that impact resident workload and workload intensity, including electronic health record (EHR) data bur...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Attending Rounds Source Type: blogs