[pdxandi]

My wife is one of these trainees left out by this "algorithm." She's an intensive care fellow and was caught up in this mess yesterday. It's really hard to witness considering how much I worry about her everyday she's on service.

My understanding is the training is capped at 80 hours/week, but they average that over the month. They definitely work more than that some weeks, but it's usually because it's not scheduled hours; it's shifts that run long because of emergencies or codes or whatever. When she was a resident and had to write patient notes, that definitely took extra hours each night after her shifts. It's brutal.

And for what it's worth, not all doctors make great money after training. In pediatrics, salaries are generally half what adult doctors make. For a lot of subspecialties, that's on par with average software engineering salaries, even after about 14 years of education and training.