Insights on Residency Training

August 4th, 2022

Uncertainty in Medicine — The “July Effect” and Beyond

Khalid A. Shalaby, MBBCh

When I first started residency, I was uncertain and hesitant with most of my clinical decisions. As medical students, we gain considerable knowledge through our medical school curriculum. But gaining knowledge and applying it to practice are two different sets of skills. Because I followed medical school graduation by a hiatus doing bench research, I […]

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April 30th, 2021

Riding the Second Wave

Stephanie Braunthal, DO

I just finished attending one of our inpatient teaching services, and it felt like the panel was one of the most varied and medically complex I have ever taken care of. This was my first week as an inpatient attending — as an ambulatory chief, most of my clinical time is with the residents in […]

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February 18th, 2021

The Human Side of Medicine — Grieving the Loss of Our Patients

Masood Pasha Syed, MBBS

“The life of the dead is placed in the memories of the living” — Marcus Tullius Cicero Growing up in a family of physicians, I was exposed early to healthcare from the provider side. Some days, my father would come home late after a long surgery with an unanticipated complication or an unexpected outcome and would […]

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January 22nd, 2021

Gratitude – Reflections on 2020

Vivek Sant, MD

2020 was a tough year. With natural disasters around the world, a global pandemic, and significant social and economic upheaval both in the U.S. and abroad, no one has emerged unaffected. Especially in medicine, we have acutely experienced our share of grief and loss and have witnessed humanity in its most broken state. In the […]

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January 12th, 2021

Vaccine [Rollout] Reactions — In Support of Residents

Stephanie Braunthal, DO

During the first week of the U.S. national vaccine rollout, news outlets reported a protest after a major medical center’s initial COVID-19 vaccine distribution list did not include almost the entirety of their house staff. Less publicly, I have heard about additional instances across the country where trainees as a whole have been or felt […]

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September 3rd, 2020

“Never Waste a Crisis”: Perspectives from History and Today

Holland Kaplan, MD

The mantra “Never waste a crisis” has stuck with me for the past several months. This statement was reportedly made by Winston Churchill in the 1940s, during World War II. However, a well-known internal medicine faculty member and leader at Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. David Hyman, who recently passed away, also gave us this […]

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July 16th, 2020

Well, Did You Learn Anything?

Allison Latimore, MD

When I told my friends that I was going to be the Chief of Education for my residency program, they were stunned. How can you be a chief resident as a second-year resident? Isn’t that going to be a lot of work? How can you juggle it all? These were all valid questions that I […]

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July 1st, 2020

Dual Crises and the Call for Resident Unionization

Eric Bressman, MD

On March 20th, as the chaos of the unfolding pandemic enveloped New York City, Governor Cuomo issued Executive Order 202.10, which, among other directives, temporarily suspended work hour restrictions for medical residents in New York State. These regulations, which had been enacted 30 years prior, were the consequence of the journalist Sidney Zion’s well-publicized crusade […]

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May 19th, 2020

Safety Net: Reflections on the Elmhurst Experience

Eric Bressman, MD

Elmhurst 2014 I first arrived at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, NY, in the summer of 2014 as a medical student on my surgery rotation. We would take occasional night shifts as part of the trauma team. It was the first time I held a pager. Code yellow meant hurry, code red meant run. One of our […]

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May 12th, 2020

Our Public Hospital Leads Massachusetts in Caring for Coronavirus Patients

Frances Ue, MD, MPH

Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), where I work, is a small hospital system serving the north Boston-metro area across two campuses in Cambridge and Everett but, despite its modest scale, it has arguably become the center of Massachusetts’ fight against COVID-19. This is no small feat, given that Massachusetts has the third largest number of coronavirus […]

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