Signout is hospital slang for the transfer of information between patient care teams. It is also the name of this blog, which represents one of the less dysfunctional ways in which Dr. Signout copes with her participation in a U.S. medical residency program.
Today was my first day of residency. In the large, academic medical center where I work, the wards were filled with people like me: kids fresh out of medical school, creases still not washed out of our long white coats, playing with the buttons on our beepers, looking for the bathrooms. For the next year, we will be the interns, and on this first day, we tried to like it. It wasn't that hard, right? There was a free lunch, and the nurses were really nice to us. Plus, now we have real responsibility. We love responsibility.
It gets easier to be an intern with every year that passes. A few years ago, a national standard was enacted, mandating a maximum-80-hour work week for medical residents with the goal of improving patient care by reducing resident fatigue. This has placed at least a temporal limit on the amount of shit we can take. And although medicine is certainly a conservative field in many ways, the old, patriarchal approach is considered less cool than it used to be. In the setting of a shortage of American medical grads, all but the most popular programs have to work to make themselves attractive to applicants; at mine, for example, we get a free lunch not just on the first day, but every day.
So my first day of my first year of residency--my intern year--was probably less scary for me than it would've been twenty, ten, or even five years ago. And although my patients certainly weren't aware of it, it was much less scary for them, too.
I'll try to share as much as I can in this space.
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