Stop treating medical residents like indentured servants

Starting medical school at 28 would also create a perfect situation for starting families. Exams can be made up easily after a maternity or paternity leave in the first or second year. Employers may scrutinize time off to care for children during one’s working years, but time off during medical school typically does not attract the same questioning.

It’s a different story in residency. Hospitals are known for punishing trainees who take even legitimate time off, in part because that supposedly creates more work for others. Hospital residents who took as little as six weeks of maternity leave have reported to the American Medical Association that punitive actions were taken against them, including being forced to work as poorly paid residents for an extra year or having their residency positions given away.

Children would enter school age as their parents were entering residency, with parents able to claim dependent tax deductions on their meager salaries. Further, having children before residency generally means that grandparents would be younger, healthier, and better able to help care for their grandchildren. Right now, many physicians struggle with stressful jobs, the demands of young children, and sick, elderly parents – all at the same time. That contributes to doctors reducing their hours or leaving the profession.

Medical residents and fellows should receive three months of paid maternity and paternity leave, of course, but the retaliation culture in teaching hospitals is so widespread that preempting that process entirely may be more workable

It is common for physicians to defer having children until their mid-to-late 30s – after residency and fellowship – adding fertility problems to their burdens. Prioritizing childbearing during the younger years before residency would drastically reduce the numbers of miscarriages, birth defects, pregnancy complications in physician families. Importantly, all of these health concerns directly translate to a loss of clinical hours for which those guaranteed payday loan Oklahoma physicians are available to take care of patients.

Starting medical school at age 28 would also help break the cycle of abuse endemic in medical education. Attending doctors – the ones who do most of the teaching – tend to be age 35 and older, while medical students can be as young as 23 when they enter the hospital setting, with no real-world work experience. The rampant bullying, intimidation, and harassment by attending physicians would diminish by their teaching older students who have worked in other fields. Over the years, this would ideally result in a more dignified and intellectual culture in medicine than exists today.

Having established a career before entering medical school can also be a hedge against the capricious nature of medical training. No medical student should begin such an expensive and stressful journey without the confidence that another job awaits should things go awry. Residency trainees can find their contracts not renewed with no way to obtain board certification – a necessity for obtaining a job in the overwhelming majority of hospitals and clinics. For example, more than 500 residents and fellows lost their jobs as a result of the closure of Hahnemann Hospital in 2019.

Students could take advantage of perks like on-campus child care and a more relaxed schedule with the ability to attend lectures via internet

Every year, fourth-year medical students apply for slots in residency training programs. Not all of them get invited to one. Many join the pool of several thousand unmatched (read: unemployed) derican system that does not fund all medical students to work in residency programs and gives some of those funded positions to foreign medical graduates. In other words, going to medical school is no guarantee of working as a resident and becoming a des of residency selection, graduates of M.D. or D.O. programs are not even allowed to work as physician assistants.