Moonlighting Matters…

 

This is my column from last January’s EM News.  Moonlighting made me a better, more competent physician during residency.  (And was a financial win considering I had a new wife and a lot of debt from medical school.)  Given the difficulty we have staffing small, rural hospitals, it’s a tradition that we need to revisit and widely.  In fact, I think every small hospital should be ‘adopted’ by a large teaching center so that residents can go to those hospitals and supplement the staff and in disasters be able to provide surge.  Not just in the ER, mind you, but also in the other hospital areas like critical care or even the OR.

Consider that a disaster can be a local affair. A small hospital can have ten patients from one van crash and be entirely overwhelmed.  Rather than always trying to move all of the patients, we should be able to move physicians to the site.  A medical ‘quick reaction force,’ of sorts.  Anyway, just my two cents on the matter.

 

https://journals.lww.com/em-news/Fulltext/2021/01000/Life_in_Emergistan__The_Lost_Tradition_of.19.aspx

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