Physicians train in medical school and residency during their peak child bearing and young child rearing years.

What if we could make the return-to-work easier for new parents during residency training?

https://pixabay.com/photos/baby-child-father-parent-2616673/

In 2018, my colleagues and I set out to do the impossible: fundamentally change the way that new resident parents returned to work.

Until then, new mothers received state mandated maternity leave followed by a return to overnight shifts, extended strings of up to 6 days of work in a row, and home call. New fathers received nothing, unless their employer was generous enough to provide a brief paternity leave.

That was until 2018.

That year, we sucessfully pilot tested a new return-to-work policy that addressed the most common stressors for new resident parents: night shifts, weeks without sequential days off, and home call. Each of these stressors were eliminated or abbreviated for up to 4 weeks for expectant mothers and 6 weeks post-partum for all new parents (irrespective of delivery, adoption, or surrogacy.)

The policy is accompanied by a new parent checklist of to-do items and need to know university resources.

This project is one of my favorite bits of medical education scholarship because it resulted in a pragmatic policy that has affected the lives of many new parents in the Stanford University Emergency Medicine Residency Program.

Check out a description of the policy and its development in an article in Academic Emergency Medicine.

October 30, 2022

Co-Authors of original manuscript: Alexandra June Gordon, Stefanie S Sebok-Syer, Ann M Dohn, Rebecca Smith-Coggins, N Ewen Wang, and Sarah R Williams (all from Stanford University)