Scalpel: “This first year as a physician is the foundation for the rest of your career.”
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{ 3 comments }
I’m a D.O.
We still have rotating internships, at least those who continue osteopathic training. I did an osteopathic internship, then allopathic after that.
Personally, I’m still a fan of the rotating internship. Advantages is the exposure to multiple areas with more training and responsibility under your belt.
Disadvantage can be, the intern “belongs” to no department, and if run badly, no one feels any responsibility to teach the intern.
What does the group think?
I did a rotating internship and think overall it was a very good experience but it was mixed. The weak rotations were the ones to outside hospitals where I did minor scut for some attending during the day–the good part of those however was being the only housestaff in the hospital at night. I got to run a lot of codes as an intern.
But I am glad that most of it was in the teaching hospital on the traditional academic services. There I was treated as a full part of the team, but only after a brief period of watching (usually no more than 24 hours) to see how competent and on the ball I was.
I think the main thing with internship is to get one where the housestaff is taking care of the patients and their are plenty of patients to keep everyone overworked so that you will be forced to take real primary responsibility for patients.
I don’t think anyone is really supposed to teach the intern. The intern is supposed to do and learn thereby, and the “teaching” largely consisting of pointing out what he did wrong and by example. In my best rotations as an intern the upper level staff were more there as consultants for us to call on–and peeked over our shoulders in case we didn’t have enough sense to know we needed to call.
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