post call

can anyone explain to me exactly what Post Call is? I have a general idea, but any info would help me get it better...thanks!

[SuzySunshine]

Like most medical terms it depends on the residency and location. Here it means the resident is home usually by noon and doesn't go back in until the following morning, but again - it depends on the location.

[Michele]

here it means he is 'off' at 1pm and doesn't go back in until the next morning.

"Call" is when they are on for the evening. Unlike nurses or techs or most every other reasonable job, the evening shifts are not usuallly covered by a new shift, but by people who's turn it is to stay and work the night, too. Depending on specialty, year, service, etc., they may or may not steal a few minutes or hours of sleep.

"Post" would refer to the day after, when some programs allow the person to go home earlier than their peers, while others expect them to stay and work another day.

In our world it meant he worked all night (after working all day), and then usually worked the next day in it's entirety, arriving home around 7 or 8 PM.

[GrayMatterWife]

Post-call = sleepwalking in scrubs.

It's an awesome time to really exploit his state of pseudo-consciousness.

I enjoy completely messing with him in his altered state.

[spotty_dog]

It usually means the resident has been working for at least the past 30 hours. In our program, how that affects the person we see at home depends on the department he's working in and the attending doctor he's working with.

For example, the first time my husband had call in the Medicine department, he started his day probably at 5am (rode his bike there so left the house about 3:30), checked on all "his" patients in preparation for rounds, attended rounds (all members of the team check out all of the patients), performed some work for "his" patients (he and his senior resident were assigned to some percentage of the patients on the floor) as dictated by what was observed on rounds (ordered labs, analyzed labs that had come back, etc.) then after a certain point in the day most of the rest of the team went home and he was responsible for getting ALL of the patients on the floor through the night. This meant answering pages every 3 minutes from the nursing staff who needed his input to clarify orders, alert him to problems, etc. He wasn't necessarily familiar with all of these patients since they weren't "his", but he still needed to think on the fly and do his work well. He might have caught a cat-nap or two but no extended periods of sleep.

The next day was his post-call day. That morning around 7am everybody else came back to the hospital and they had rounds again. I think the other residents would have pre-rounded in order to brief themselves on what had happened with "their" patients, so as soon as rounds had covered "his" patients and he'd wrapped up any more work for the next day, he could go home. On this first day, that was at about 1:45pm. He was so bleary that he couldn't ride his bike all the way home (this is a near-professional caliber cyclist who rode 13,000+ miles in 2006) and I met him halfway with the car; he fell asleep the second he was sitting in the car seat. He went straight to bed, emerged briefly from the bedroom for dinner, and went back to bed because he had to be up the next morning again at 3am.

THAT's post-call.

Now, sometimes a gentler rotation will let him sleep a little, maybe even 3 hours or so at a time, and he won't have to go in quite so early. That was the case on cardiology -- and when he was post-call he actually chose not to do his own hobbies or to sleep but rather to spend time with me and his son! -- but 70 hours of work a week sucks no matter how it's spent.

Yup, what spotty_dog said. DH is post call today from CCU (which most likely means no more than 3 hours of sleep each night.) He was JUST NOW taking a "nap" and he got a phone call from the hospital about one of the patients. He's out in his truck in the rain reading charts right now. Looks like no rest for him today.