Burning the Midnight Oil: A Focus Group Study of Medical Student Night Call Preferences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract BACKGROUND: Call is an integral component of clerkship, providing unique clinical and educational opportunities. Recently, traditional call has been the subject of scrutiny, resulting in changes to call requirements. Canadian Pediatric clerkships currently employ a variety of call modalities, including night float, evening call, and overnight call. OBJECTIVES: To explore the impact that call modalities have on medical students, and elucidate preferences. DESIGN/METHODS: We conducted focus groups of 5-7 medical students each. Participants were asked about their experiences with various call systems during clerkship. Verbatim transcripts were analyzed independently by 2 team members using grounded-theory. All codes were further reviewed by the Principal Investigator. RESULTS: Thirty-eight students participated in 6 focus groups. Four over-arching themes were identified as influencing call preferences: (1) Educational value, including patient volume and variety, hands-on experience, and teaching; (2) Quality of life, including fatigue/burn-out, ability to maintain a healthy lifestyle, and free time; (3) Continuity and quality of patient care; (4) Contribution to professional identity and acquisition of CanMEDS roles. Overnight call was described as a “rite of passage”, contributing to improved time management skills, a sense of collegiality, and self-perception as future physicians. With traditional call, post-call days provide opportunity to maintain well-being, although some believe 24-hour shifts impair ability to learn. Moreover, this call modality results in the lowest patient continuity of care. With regard to night float, most students appreciate focused call duties, and enjoy consistency with residents, resulting in greater bonding and teaching. However, they have difficulty adjusting to a nocturnal schedule, and lament missing daytime educational activities during call week. Evening call has the fewest patient encounters, least teaching, and worst fatigue and burn-out. Nonetheless, this call modality has the best patient continuity of care with no loss of daytime work. Students designated overnight call and night float as their preferred modalities, with evening call being unanimously rated least favourite. Students believe that specific goal-setting, and feedback from residents and staff are lacking across all call modalities. CONCLUSION: Students emphasize educational value and quality of life as important determinants of their call experience. Interestingly, acquisition of professional attributes and continuity of care play an important role in determining call preferences. We suggest that integrating the above elements and introducing a formal “call curriculum”, may make the clerkship call experience more standardized and beneficial to medical students, facilitating their growth as medical professionals.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".