<p>Hello,</p>
<p>I am still in high school so try to bear with me.
Can a person practice/work in a hospital right after medical school?</p>
<p>Thanks in Advance:)</p>
<p>no. you need to go do a residency (3 to 6 yrs depending on the field and then few more years for fellowships for some specialties)</p>
<p>Thanks for the reply, you people are seriously awesome in this forum… you reply to threads so fast!!!</p>
<p>In case some of you do not know this: When you are in a residency program, you are paid (by federal government’s Medicare program) but not much, about $45000, plus/minus $5000, each year (before tax.)</p>
<p>I imagine that some residents “work in a hospital right after medical school”.</p>
<p>For the love of all that is holy, yes, residents work in a hospital right after medical school…</p>
<p>To the OP, think of residency as an apprenticeship. Newly graduated doctors have learned the basic sciences of medical care, participated in rotating clerkships in a variety of medical fields and learned the basic skills necessary to see, interact, document, and have some idea of what needs to be done for a patient. But they lack experience - for example, the first year surgery resident may know that someone’s gall bladder is sick, but they’re not yet sophisticated to make that decision to take it out, let alone how the actual surgery would go each step of the way. So they train under older physicians who do have that experience, and by the end of their training, the resident is ready to practice without anyone looking over their shoulder. </p>
<p>Every field of medicine will have some inpatient hospital component. Some fields like Family Medicine, Psychiatry and Physical Medicine & Rehab will have larger outpatient clinic components. Other fields including Internal Medicine and Pediatrics will have a relatively even mix of both clinic and inpatient experiences (for example, I just finished my pediatrics residency last week, I completed a total of 6 ICU months, 12 inpatient wards months, and 9 required outpatient clinic months with the remaining months electives in other pediatric specialties). Other fields like many of the surgical fields will have much, much more inpatient hospital time and less clinic. After completion of residency, people can further specialize - I for one love being in the hospital and have chosen a field (Pediatric Critical Care) in which there’s never any outpatient clinic. Others love being in clinic and choose things that are almost exclusively clinic based.</p>