Posts in Medical Education
The Birth of a Return to Work Policy for New Resident Parents

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)