A Place to Store My Things

  The strains of constant admissions in residency is no joke. So when I had the chance to look at my residency’s admission data, I was curious if our patient census felt as crushing as it actually was. In family medicine, there are no ACGME caps. Our program also did not have the structure, often found in internal medicine programs, of long-call, shart-call, post or Qx call. We admitted and discharged every day we were on wards. We spent well over half the year with a census of 20, which passes the sniff test Patient Census Shiny App

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