shayPS Posted February 14, 2015 Just wondering what the last year of PA school is like and what hours interns work? Is it long 12 hour shifts working in hospital? I guess I am asking about rotations and shifts as an intern in the last year of PA school. Thanks in advance! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
smccccc Posted February 14, 2015 At the hospital I work in the PAs students work 12 hour shifts and one 24 a week.
Timon Posted February 14, 2015 It's like working a regular shift as if you were in that specialty, except, you have a bunch of case logs you need to log for your school in addition to the soap notes you are doing in clinic, while studying for an End of Rotation (EOR) exam that has PANCE like questions written by the PAEA, not to mention any additional busy work your program gives you or reading / homework assignments your preceptor gives you because you didn't know an answer to one of their random trivia questions. My morning starts at 5am where I get some studying in for an hour or 2, then depending on the rotation I'll head into the clinic or hospital (usually 6am-9am dependent on my preceptor). You see patients all day, perform procedures (if they let you), and do a lot of chatting. The rotation ends when your preceptor says it ends which can be between 5pm or 8pm for most of my rotations. There was one day where I was in from 5am until 3am the next day during surgery (most my surgery days were from 6am- 9-10pm M-F). Then when you get home you study or do any homework you have to do. The PAEA EOR exam had a blueprint and topic list so you'll spend time studying those topics for the exam. My program gives us assignments from a program called Challenger and we have to complete a new set every month, along with a clinical write up (SOAP Note), a paper on one of the diagnosis you made in your clinical write up, log each patient you saw including ICD-9 and CPT codes / hours, age / sex / race / C/O language, insured or not, what type of setting you were in and a bunch of other stuff (this is for each patient and is used for reporting to the PAEA for quality of rotations), and depending on the rotation I'll have to write a reflective paper on my experience during that rotation as a healthcare provider. When I'm all done with that I go to sleep (usually around midnight / 1am) and then repeat my day.
lov2xlr8 Posted February 14, 2015 Just wondering what the last year of PA school is like and what hours interns work? Is it long 12 hour shifts working in hospital? I guess I am asking about rotations and shifts as an intern in the last year of PA school. Thanks in advance! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Just for proper in hospital wording, "Intern" is a first year resident. As a PA student on rotations, you will be a "PA-S", "PAS-2", or other abbreviations which pop up from time to time... Hours might be long, but much better than sitting through 960 slide .ppt's in didactic year, will finally get to do what you signed up for. Second year is great.
dndandrea Posted February 14, 2015 It's like working a regular shift as if you were in that specialty, except, you have a bunch of case logs you need to log for your school in addition to the soap notes you are doing in clinic, while studying for an End of Rotation (EOR) exam that has PANCE like questions written by the PAEA, not to mention any additional busy work your program gives you or reading / homework assignments your preceptor gives you because you didn't know an answer to one of their random trivia questions. My morning starts at 5am where I get some studying in for an hour or 2, then depending on the rotation I'll head into the clinic or hospital (usually 6am-9am dependent on my preceptor). You see patients all day, perform procedures (if they let you), and do a lot of chatting. The rotation ends when your preceptor says it ends which can be between 5pm or 8pm for most of my rotations. There was one day where I was in from 5am until 3am the next day during surgery (most my surgery days were from 6am- 9-10pm M-F). Then when you get home you study or do any homework you have to do. The PAEA EOR exam had a blueprint and topic list so you'll spend time studying those topics for the exam. My program gives us assignments from a program called Challenger and we have to complete a new set every month, along with a clinical write up (SOAP Note), a paper on one of the diagnosis you made in your clinical write up, log each patient you saw including ICD-9 and CPT codes / hours, age / sex / race / C/O language, insured or not, what type of setting you were in and a bunch of other stuff (this is for each patient and is used for reporting to the PAEA for quality of rotations), and depending on the rotation I'll have to write a reflective paper on my experience during that rotation as a healthcare provider. When I'm all done with that I go to sleep (usually around midnight / 1am) and then repeat my day. Working over 80 hours a week with just a few hours of sleep each day doesn't really make much sense. First off, you don't learn much when you are sleep deprived and secondly you have patients' lives in your hands. Does anyone see any reason why we encourage this? I'm not saying I don't believe you, and I know residents also work these kinds of hours (even though they've tried to cut back). I just don't understand why. I can understand 60 hours per a 5 day work week, but 80 is just silly... I having a feeling some people here might slam me for sounding so naive though.
Moderator EMEDPA Posted February 14, 2015 Moderator you know the problem with call every other night? you miss half the cool cases....surgeons really believe this. my schedule on various rotations was as follows: trauma surgery: alternating 24 and 12 hr days for 5 weeks. 1 whole day off in 5 weeks. > 600 hrs for this rotation. yes, we could sleep in the hospital Hospital inpt IM 50 hrs/week for 5 weeks. early am rounds emergency medicine: 6 12 hrs shifts/week. all shifts over 5 weeks peds emergency med 50 hrs/week for 5 weeks. all days inpt lockdown psych 50 hrs/week for 5 weeks. all days OB: 60 hrs/week for 5 weeks including night call. covered clinic, L+D, and OR FP 50 hrs/week for 12 weeks . all days. community em elective : 50 hrs/week for 12 weeks. all days
PACdan Posted February 16, 2015 I would hope that med/PA students on any rotation are not being worked >80 per week on avg. That's the legal cap for medical residents, and evidence has shown time and time again that efficiency, learning, and safety all decline sharply with such long hours. I imagine that surgery and other inpatient rotations will demand the most hours, but they should never exceed the legal and ethical limits. I know old medical fogies will be upset because that's "not the way we did it"... when they were walking 12 miles uphill, both ways, in the snow each shift to get to the hospital.
greenmood Posted February 16, 2015 My rotations weren't like the above examples except for surgery, infectious disease elective, and one of my hospital inpatient medicine rotations. On those ones I did get there butt ugly early and left late... or slept over. Loved every minute. They were my favorite rotations. My women's health rotation was the most unpredictable for obvious reasons and involved a lot of call. That usually translated into sleeping in shitty beds while I waited for someone to go into labor. Family medicine was cushy. Three long days at clinic and a half day at a nursing home per week, had the rest of the time to myself in the middle of summer. Lovely. EM was the most regular hours I had. I've always been a quick, efficient charter, so documentation never kept me there longer than my shift. Pediatrics was similar. Longer hours than EM, but generally reasonable. I think a lot depends on where you are and how your preceptor likes to run his/her practice. If she is in private practice and leaves at exactly 5pm and locks the clinic on her way out, you probably can bet on leaving at the same time. If he's in a hospital where there is always another patient, you might expect to stay longer. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Timon Posted February 16, 2015 My rotations weren't like the above examples except for surgery, infectious disease elective, and one of my hospital inpatient medicine rotations. I'm on my 4th months of rotations. So far I've completed 2 months of IM, 1 month of cardiothoracic surgery, and I'm in my community medicine rotation right now. So it sounds like our rotations have been about the same from the sample size I've experienced. I'd also like to state I in no way feel over worked or sleep deprived. I feel my total hours spent on rotations vs didactic year have been the same.
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.