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Special Deal for Blog Readers: The Residency Coordinator’s Handbook $89
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Solutions for never ending filing
Do you often wonder what it takes to get those elves to come to your office to do the filing?
I’ve gone as far as putting out milk and cookies. It seems like a good idea until I end up eating them. I’m left sitting there with all the filing and a few extra calories!
Enable or empower?
In an effort to increase compliance in all areas of the program, the coordinators and admins page the residents constantly. Time for their didactic conference? Page them! They’ve neglected to turn in paperwork? Page them! Too many residents missing from weekly admin meeting? Page them! Time to check in on duty hours? Page them!
I can’t honestly say this has increased compliance in any area, but it has set a bad precedent. The residents don’t make a move without a page. When we don’t page them, the residents don’t know where to go or what to do. They just end up calling us to find out!
This significant amount of hand holding has created a lack of resourcefulness on the part of the residents. It’s also a huge time suck for us administrators.
My goal is to solve this problem by taking the conference schedule we currently have and convert it to a master calendar the residents can access online. It will list all educational conferences, so on any given day of any week, the residents can see where to go and what to do. The second, and more difficult step, will be to retrain the residents to use this as their “go-to” resource rather than deferring to us.
I’ll keep you posted and let you know how it turns out! If anyone else has dealt with a situation like this and has some words of wisdom, I’d love to hear them.
Quick tips for site visit and PIF success
Site visit and program information form (PIF) preparation is no easy task. With so much to do, it’s easy for the smallest details to fall through the cracks. Check for the following when getting ready for a site visit:
- Use the most current version of your PIF. Before submitting the PIF, check one last time to see if your specialty’s has been updated. If your PIF has changed, talk to your specialty executive director to see if you need to use the new PIF, or if you can submit the outdated, form. Some say yes, some say no.
- Check your WebADS information. Be sure all your additions and deletions have been recorded correctly. If something is amiss, contact your application and data coordinator for help. They are very nice to work with and quite timely in their responses.
What other little tips and hints do you readers have for those preparing for a site visit?
Goodbye down time. Hello organization.
I used to think about the summer as “down time” in my job. I used the extra time to catch up with filing and reports, and I got things ready for the upcoming academic year.
Those were the good old days. Since early this century (sounds foreboding doesn’t it!), my down time has disappeared. I like to say that down time has gone the way of typewriters and glass soda bottles.
Managing residents’ files, portfolios, evaluations, and other paperwork fills that extra time completely. I suspect that you all know just what I’m talking about.
Organization is more important than ever, and it takes a lot of time to stay organized. Portfolios can be a nightmare to stay on top of, but I’ve found a method that makes it a little easier. Use six or eight section classification folders for resident portfolios and reports. Use one for each year to hold all the resident’s end of year evaluation reports. This makes them easy to find when you need them.
I know this isn’t the only system out there. How do you organize your resdients’ portfolio elements? Leave a comment below.
Love your medical students
When I first started as residency coordinator, I couldn’t figure out what the deal was with “all these short coat folks.” Who were they and why were they at conference eating my lunches?
My perspective, three years later, makes me realize that the short coats are just the long coats of the future. Not only does their clerkship here provide them with valuable education, it is also a marketing opportunity for us!
Instead of working around them, we’ve taken a different approach. Our chiefs run their student morning report, and we invite them to all of our lunches, conferences, and other relevant educational experiences intentionally. We’ve actually brought the clerkship coordinator under our roof as part of our staff. We try to do more hands-on things like posting each group’s photos in advance for the entire ward team to see, and providing them with a special survival guide to our service so that they know not only that we love them, but that we’d love them to stay here.
Sleepy resident
For those of you who don’t know, I live right in the middle of Boston. Last week, I was on the T—Boston’s subway system— and I noticed a young man falling asleep in his seat right in the middle of this crowded, noisy, jostling train.
I felt bad for the poor guy and started to look away, but before I turned my head, I saw he was wearing hospital scrubs. Although there’s no way for me to know for sure, I guessed this sleepy traveler was a resident feeling the effects of fatigue.
Seeing this really hit home for me and underscored the importance of duty hour limitations, and educating residents on what to do if they’re feeling fatigued. As I watched him—eyes closed, head continuously nodding off— I couldn’t help but put myself in the place of the last patient he saw that day.
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