Those who have completed their ophthalmology residencies can vouch that it wasn’t easy. There is variability in the efficiency in which a resident clinic operates, but most of them are busy. You have an excessive number of scheduled patients along with walk-ins that consume your day. In addition, there are insurance and scheduling issues to consider. If you are in a small program, your call schedule will be packed.

My medicine counterparts whine to me how dermatology and ophthalmology consults are so lazy because our consult notes until the next day. Most of the time we do our non-emergent consults in the evenings. During the day we have clinic patients to see. The program I am in has a resident rotation dedicated to consults, but it is intermingled with surgical time. We run between clinic patients to see our inpatients, and many of our evenings and weekends are filled with lectures or clinic.

The most difficult adjustment that I’ve encountered in my two weeks of residency is that I am a PGY-2 with intern knowledge. Our medical education is geared toward training us to be internists, not surgeons or subspecialists. We have to relearn a dedicated physical exam for the eye. Right from the beginning, we are (in theory), the experts in our field.

Hopefully, it will be easier as the year progresses…

medicine ophthalmology