 So brand new doctors being used for the coronavirus outbreak. One of my thoughts, this is a good idea, let's get into it. All right guys, welcome to another episode in the MD journey in the TMJ show. My name is Laksha, I'm internal medicine resident making videos, podcasts, just like this one to help people just like you succeed on their medical journey. Today, I wanted to talk about a topic that's kind of come up in the news in the last few weeks, which is more and more med schools are having to debate whether or not they want to graduate their fourth year medical school class a little bit early. Now, part of this is just having to get through graduation, knowing that a lot of us may still be in some form of social isolation by then, but also a little bit of do we need more doctors to kind of be able to join the pipeline. So I really wanted to share my thoughts, you know, the whether it's a good idea, whether maybe not so much. So let's get into it. But before I give you my thoughts, make sure if you do enjoy this video, if you want a little bit more reaction like videos like this one, hit that like button and subscribe button and support the community. So fourth year medical students graduating early, getting pushed into the pipeline of residents quicker, good idea or not. So initially, the start of the few weeks ago when NYU kind of announced that they would be moving their graduation for their fourth year class up into April of 2020 and overtime, more medical schools have announced that they'll do something of the same. Now, the real question is that you're graduating more medical students. Do you want them to jump into the realms of residency a little bit quicker? Honestly, I'm a little bit mixed about it because a few things you have to remember when you're a fourth year medical student, a lot of your time is actually spent away from medicine. You're spending several months doing the interview cycle. You may have several months of vacation. I know I did. And your ability to practice medicine and be fresh on the stuff that's like clinically important is pretty limited. You've kind of been removed from patient care for a couple of months, especially when you think about the traditional route where a lot of medical students are graduating in the months of May, early June and then starting residency in mid June to early July is when their first official day is a doctor. Now, if you accelerate the process and you make them graduate in April, it's still going to take some time for the residency program to kind of incorporate you into it. So there's still going to be a month or so delay, but if anything, I feel like you're still kind of that naive, novice med student that's going to need a little bit of time to accustom themselves to what it's like to become a doctor. Now, that part itself is not new, but when you consider what hospitals and residency programs are having to do, how critical the patients that are experiencing both COVID as well as other medical conditions, you know, how busy the hospital is. Is it a good idea to throw in new trainings at that time? And frankly, I just don't know if that's going to be an amazing idea. You know, there's a lot of people like me who are going to transition from early training into like a supervising upper level resident and to be able to try to put my upper level hat on in a busy ICU setting where I'm taking care of a lot of sick patients, but then also having to supervise a new doctor who's going to have to learn, you know, not only how to take care of patients, but how to put in orders and how to be efficient and how to take notes. And a lot of things that just take some time. So if you throw them in the fire hoping that they'll help with the corona outbreak, I don't know if you'll be able to get as much bang for your buck. Obviously, there's going to be areas of the country that are just being hit hard and potentially new trainings are just going to be able to help with some of the initial very elementary tasks. And for those situations, I can understand. But if you're trying to expect that new brand new graduates are going to be able to perform at the level of a doctor from day one, I wasn't able to perform at the level of a doctor into like month five or six. And I'm still learning when that was without, you know, a virus outbreak. So you can only imagine the stress that goes on both the training as they're kind of starting their new life as a doctor, as well as everyone that's kind of supervising them and trying to take care of patients at the same time. So I don't know if it's the best idea, graduating them early shore and giving them some time to get incorporated in the residency program they're going to because they've already matched by now understanding what the expectations are and maybe giving some time to do some review and learning and then maybe joining in some of the elementary and kind of foundational tasks. That way, the people that are a little bit more experienced in taking care of very sick patients can do their job without having to feel a little bit kind of dry. Now, obviously, that's just my opinion at the moment. This obviously may change. I'll let you guys know in the comment section down below. If I feel like I'm over my head, the residency program around the countries are over their head. They just need more help in the hospitals, more help. And the last thing that we have to think about before we can conclude is if more and more physicians and more and more healthcare takers are becoming sick, then you are going to need people to replace them. It's just a little bit tricky because either you need to get these new graduates in the front lines as everybody's still a little bit healthy to learn the ropes because you just wouldn't want a medical graduate to be an unsupervised or a minimally supervised environment. So if we are going to go ahead and move and accelerate people from graduation into residency quicker, I hope we do it in a time span where a majority of the healthcare system is still able to function while doing the training instead of hoping that they'll just fill in spots for sick physicians. What it is, as I mentioned in the last video about the virus outbreak, something that we're just always going to be a little bit known on. It's not something we've experienced at least in the last few years. And so a lot of programs, institutions, states, and the whole country is kind of just trying to figure things out as we go. I really love to know your thoughts and questions on the topics. So let me know in the comment section down below. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this episode, a little bit of inside take without too much of tips and advice, but we'll get back to our original content in the next video. So thank you guys so much for stopping by. Make sure you hit that like and subscribe button. I'll see you guys in the next video. Peace.