What exactly is scut work?

No one is going to deny that collating data to help your service run more smoothly isn't beneficial. Pushing the patient to radiology, rushing orders, following up on orders, running to the blood bank, all of that is helpful for the patient and the service. The problem arises in the manner in which it is done. When a large chunk of the repetitive monotonous tasks are dumped onto the students with little to no benefit to the student or when it actually takes the student away from useful patient interactions and observing procedures its monkey work with no purpose.

"Have you finished getting all the lab values before rounds? No? Sorry, then no assisting in the OR for you" this is the type of shit people used to pull. You would see a patient, do all the leg work but then they wouldn't let you participate in the management or plan, teach you, or won't let you observe a procedure or assist. Why? Some would tell you outright that you would slow them down. That was the issue with scutwork. Services used to abuse students for their gain with little or no reward to students. Students were expected to believe that servitude was the privilege not actually learning. It wasn't surprising to find that students hadn't seen a single delivery or a c-section on a OBGYN rotation. What did they do? Lots of busy work to help the patients. Residents would dump scut on students and keep they away from getting underfoot. Typing up endless discharge summaries all day, changing all the dressings on the surgical floor while the rest of the team went to the OR - every single day of the week. There has to be a balance. Part of the problem was how little attendings and residents knew or cared about what they wanted to do with their rotating students. The student was expected to be "eager" and learn by asking the service to teach them and give them things to do. On calls the resident would send the student to do all the legwork in the middle of the night while they slept in the oncall room.

/r/medicalschool Thread Parent