Resident Lounge

Congratulations, you've made it through four grueling years of medical school, and now people call you Doctor! But with great power comes great responsibility. You want to do everything possible to not contribute to the "July effect" - the 10% increase in medical errors in teaching hospitals during the month of July...

Bedside point of care ultrasound (POCUS) is increasingly being incorporated into patient care outside of the emergency department to help with decision making at the patient’s bedside. In what patient assessment situations can POCUS be used and what is its role in traditional radiologist-driven ultrasound studies? Are there data...

Trust is the foundation of relationships between patients and the health care system. But assumptions about how trust is created and maintained have to be reexamined on the basis of an understanding of evolving roles of facts, expertise, and authority in our society.

The evidence to date does not confirm the hypothesis that the Gold Open Access publication model will advance science and be an unprecedented public good. So this is a surprising time to insist that scientific content should be “free” online, as Europe’s Plan S aims to do.

The elderly woman has demand-related ischemia and needs a transfusion, but she’s a Jehovah’s Witness. Soon, her hospital room becomes the site of a fraught battle between her family members and representatives of her church, and it’s up to the intern to intervene.

In this cluster-randomized trial involving 63 internal-medicine residency programs governed by either the 2011 ACGME duty-hour rules or more flexible duty-hour rules, flexible duty-hour policies did not increase 30-day mortality or adversely affect several other patient safety outcomes.

In a world moved by story, medicine — we like to believe — is still moved by measurement. That is why, when resident work-hour limits were implemented in 2003, catalyzed by the tragic death of Libby Zion...

Competency-based medical education holds the promise of producing a bettertrained workforce — and for many physicians, this training could be accomplished within a shorter time frame.

With trainees increasingly exposed to a culture that values efficiency, clinical protocols, and specialized expertise over scientific debate and critical thinking, new programs are creating linkages between unexplained patient presentations and scientific inquiry.

As an intern, you arrive at the hospital before dawn, speed-walk to sign-out, plan a route to see your patients before morning report — less than 10 minutes each to see how they’re feeling, examine them, check in with the nurse. Which are the moments that will matter?

There is sexism in medicine, but there may also be a more insidious obstacle. I’ve been haunted at every step of my career by the fear that I am a fraud. And not only do we women tend to perseverate over our inadequacies, we also often denigrate our strengths.

When we become obsessed with finding the right answer, at the risk of oversimplifying the richly iterative andevolutionary nature of clinical reasoning, the result is the very antithesis of humanistic, individualized patient-centered care.

One of the oddest aspects of concluding residency is the obligatory termination of all our patient relationships. The separation process highlights the value of the fundamentals of old-fashioned patient–doctor relationships. How can we make it smoother for everyone?

Through irrelevant, friendly comments or questions, physicians can establish key connections with patients. Such small talk conveys physicians' recognition of patients' individuality and their own shared experiences, observance of details, and openness to conversation.

A medical student working in a homeless shelter for mentally ill men finds himself thinking of William, a shelter resident, as one of his patients. But that's the last thing William wants to be, and the current health care system seems a long way from meeting his needs.

Dr. Michael Kahn started giving lessons to third-year medical students on working with “difficult” patients. Kahn writes that the exercises can demonstrate the immediate payoff of knowing even a little bit about a patient's life.

This featured S & S was made by Dr. Paris Charilaou from St. Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ.

African-American physicians-in-training may be isolated within the walls of their institutions, alienated by their patients, and disconnected from their training programs. Listen to the challenges and aspirations of some inspiring African-American residents in the latest episode of this podcast series.

We have invited the residents and faculty from the Medstar Washington Hospital Center/Georgetown University Internal Medicine Residency Program to engage in a journal club discussion about the NEJM article, "Thrombolysis Guided by Perfusion Imaging up to 9 Hours after Onset of Stroke" found here...

We have invited the residents and faculty from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center Internal Medicine Residency Program to engage in a journal club discussion about the NEJM articles, "Apixaban to Prevent Venous Thromboembolism in Patients with Cancer," found here...

We have invited the residents and faculty from the MetroWest Medical Center Internal Medicine Residency Program to engage in a journal club discussion about the recent NEJM article, "Adjunctive Intermittent Pneumatic Compression for Venous Thromboprophylaxis," which can be found at...