Last year, the ABMS–the umbrella consortium of medical specialties–waded into the established toxic mess of medical training schedules with a new mandate to provide trainees with a nonpunitive way to be parents, caretakers, or just sick:
Starting in July 2021, all ABMS Member Boards with training programs of two or more years duration will allow for a minimum of six weeks away once during training for purposes of parental, caregiver, and medical leave, without exhausting time allowed for vacation or sick leave and without requiring an extension in training. Member Boards must communicate when a leave of absence will require an official extension to help mitigate the negative impact on a physician’s career trajectory that a training extension may have, such as delaying a fellowship or moving into a full, salaried position.
6 weeks over the course of an entire residency may not seem like much given the vagaries of life, but it’s a better floor than many programs currently offer. A graduation delay sucks, and it’s the kind of punishment for living your life that causes many doctors to put off big milestones like starting a family. Medical training already takes a long time, and ~1 in 4 female physicians struggle with infertility (and in that study, 17% of those struggling would have picked a different specialty).
This issue is being addressed across medicine, but we’re going to discuss it in the context of radiology because I am a radiologist.
The American Board of Radiology’s recent attempt at how such language should look has drawn some ire on Twitter. Here is their email to program directors that’s been making the rounds:
They proposed that a program “may” grant up to 6 weeks of leave over the course of residency for parental/caregiver/medical leave as a maximum without needing to extend residency at the tail end. The language here doesn’t even meet the ABMS mandate, which again states that a program “will” provide a “minimum” of 6 weeks (and explicitly states that said 6 weeks of leave shouldn’t be counted against regular sick time).
The ABR could have simply taken the straightforward approach of parroting the ABMS mandate. They could have–even better–taken the higher ground with an effort to trailblaze the first generous specialty-wide parental leave policy in modern medicine.
Instead, they have advocated for a maximum of six weeks, because any more and they feel they wouldn’t be able to “support the current length of required training.” As in, if a mom gets 3 months off to care for a newborn then the whole system falls apart.
I think they realized it would be prudent to ask for feedback first and then make the plan because a new softer blog post removes any specific language:
We need your input to develop a policy that appropriately balances the need for personal time including vacation as well as parental, caregiver, and/or medical leave with the need for adequate training.
It is important to realize that the ABR is not restricting the amount of time an institution might choose to allow for parental, caregiver, and/or medical leave, nor are we limiting the amount of vacation a residency program might choose to provide. These are local decisions and the ABR does not presume to make these determinations. However, above a certain limit (not yet determined), an extension of training might be needed to satisfy the requirement for completion of the residency.
Of course, in the original proposal, the ABR literally did want to limit program vacation (to 4 weeks, see above).
After the mishandling of the “ABR agreement” debacle and the initial we-can’t-do-remote-testing Covid pseudo-plan and now this, I hope the ABR will eventually come to the conclusion that stakeholders matter and that we can make radiology better by working together as a community.
Radiology is a “male-dominated” field, but it shouldn’t be. A public relations win here could make all the difference.
Plenty of Slack
I think there are more than six weeks of slack in our 4-year training paradigm, and it’s hard to argue otherwise.
When the ABR created the Core Exam and placed it at the of the PGY4/R3 year, they created a system where a successful radiology resident has proven (caveat: to the ABR) that they are competent to practice radiology before their senior year. It created a system where the fourth year of residency was opened up largely to a choose-you-own-adventure style of highly variable impact.
We have ESIR residents who spend most of their fourth-year doing IR, and we have accelerated nuclear medicine pathway residents that do a nuclear medicine fellowship integrated into their residency. There are folks early specializing into two-year neuroradiology fellowships during senior year, and others who take a bevy of random electives that they may never use again in clinical practice.1
We have many programs with a whole host of extracurricular “tracks” where residents might spend protected time every week doing research, quality improvement, or clinician-educator activities. I would know, I did all three during my residency. We have residents doing research electives and all kinds of other interesting things that may worthwhile but have no positive impact on their ability to practice radiology clinically, which is the primary purpose of residency training.
A hypothetical example: Take a research track resident with one half-day protected time every week for 40 weeks a year (say because of 8 weeks of night float and 4 weeks of vacation). That’s 20 days a year of reduced clinical activity. 20 working days is basically a month. If they have their R1 year to just focus on learning radiology before taking call, then over the next three years that resident would be “missing” 3 months of clinical time. But no one is seriously arguing that these tracks should postpone residency graduation.
We already have a system where there are minimum case requirements for residents to complete residency training. Last I checked, the ABR is certifying radiologists in the domain of clinical radiology, not their number of peer-reviewed publications or ability to do a sick root cause analysis.
Radiology residency may be four years after a clinical internship, but it’s clear that there is no standard radiology training program clinical “length” despite that fixed duration. Some residents are already doing far fewer months.
No one is adding up diagnostic work hours and saying you need 48 weeks/yr * 52 hours/wk * 4 years = 9,984 hours.
It’s not a thing, and it shouldn’t be.
Competency-based Assessment and Reasonable Limits
The core problem is that we have time-based residencies masquerading as a proxy for competency. You don’t magically become competent when you graduate. Competency is a continuum. Hiring trainees for a set number of years is convenient. It’s easy to schedule. It’s easy to budget. But it’s an artifact of convenience, not a mission-critical component of clinical growth.
There are R3 residents who are ready for the big leagues, and there are practicing doctors who should honestly move back down to the minors. No one is going to argue that a little more training makes you worse. But the logic that more is better gets us to the unsustainable current state of affairs, where doctors are accumulating more and more training to become hyper-specialized in the least efficient way possible while non-physician providers bypass our residency/fellowship paradigm to do similar jobs with zero training.
We all get better with deliberate practice. The question isn’t: is more better? The question is how much less is still enough for independent practice?
Obviously, the ABMS member boards like the ABR don’t exactly have the power to force institutions to change policies directly, and they probably don’t want to. But they do set the stage by mandating the criteria for board eligibility.
I would argue that the ABR should set a minimum threshold and no maximum. If a program is happy with that resident’s progress and they pass the Core Exam, then consider the boxes checked. Let everyone be treated with dignity and then give the programs the flexibility to compete in the marketplace of support.
When my son was born, I was able to take 4 days of sick time and then went straight into night float. That’s bullshit. You want to see motivation? Tell an expecting resident that if they’re a total champion that they can spend as much time as they need with their baby without delaying graduation.
Less than 6 weeks is unacceptable. And while a 6-week minimum is an improvement, I think the true minimum consistent with current training practices that should also have a chance of being implemented is three months.
I’d love to see six months or more. I don’t think that’s going to happen as a minimum, and there’s a very reasonable argument against it as underperforming residents really may need some of that time back. It would be nice to see language that demands 3 months, has no maximum, and strongly encourages programs to work with residents on a case-by-case basis to ensure they are ready for graduation with however much time they have.
But the first step is to have a minimum that doesn’t punish women who want to stay home with their infants until they’re done cluster feeding. Convince me otherwise.
Fairness
The ABR doesn’t use the language of “fairness” in their email, but I suspect the perception of fairness is at play. It’s almost always at play when older doctors consider policies that might benefit younger physicians. It’s the I-did-it-this-way-and-I’m-amazing-so-it-must-be-an-integral-part-of-the process. It’s the hazing.
Right now, some lucky residents across the country get varying degrees of time “off” thanks to PD support in the form of research electives, reading electives, and program staff simply looking the other way. We need to standardize a fair minimum that enables programs to provide a consistent humane process and not just put trainees solely at the mercy of their PDs and local GME office.
Yes, it’s true that if you allow parents time to be parents or people to take care of loved ones or people time to recover from illness that some residents will work fewer months than others. Every resident has their unique experience, but a policy change will also mean that every resident may not have a similar “paper” experience. That’s a fact.
Some people will say, that’s not fair. That it’s not fair to single residents or non-parents. That it’s not fair to the able-bodied. Or to those whose aging parents are healthy or have the resources to support themselves.
But let me provide a counterpoint:
I don’t think fairness means that every single resident has to have the exact same experience. They already don’t. I think fairness means we treat humans with the respect and compassion that every person deserves. I want to live in a world where everyone gets time to be a parent, even if yes, that world means that some doctors may have a career that is a few months shorter.
I think fairness means not punishing people when life happens just because making people jump through hoops makes it easier to check a box.
If you’re ready to practice, you’re ready.
If we need to reassess the validity of an exclusively time-based (instead of competency-based) training paradigm in order to do that, then let’s get to it.