A Place to Store My Things

For anyone who has spent time in the hospital, the not-so-well-kept secret is that residents are the ones you’re likely to see most often. About 25% hospitals have residents according to the ACGME, and percentage increases when you look Critical Access Hospitals. Residents are the grunts of the medical world. They are full-fledged MDs who work worse hours for less pay than most nursing staff. Residents are the ones in the hospital overnight admitting patients and they are probably some of the first people you see in the morning as they run around trying to keep a lid on everything before the attending, or chief physician, to get to the hospital. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education runs the majority of residencies. In 1989, the ACGME instituted an 80-hour work week limit for internal medicine. A decade later, the infamous Institute of Medicine “To err is human” study was published documenting the hundreds of thousands of deaths that occur from medical errors in hosp

  It might seem like long time ago now, but a few months ago, the   Trump administration’s attempt to ban immigrants   from 6 muslim majority countries dominated the media cycle. The ban impacted people from all different walks of life, but physicians were given some special attention as there is not insignificant foreign physician workforce in the US,   including 7000 from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen . In April, Peter Kahn and Tova Gardin published a  Research Letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) . The article includes a table of number and percent of active physicians holding H1B visas. A few things surprised me in the map. When I saw the data, I thought it would make an interesting  cartogram , a type of map that weighs the geographic area by the data instead of land mass. Two things surprised me in the cartogram/data: H1B holding physicians are predominantly in the Midwest, with an outsized number in Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois. The Sou