The value of “scutwork” for medical students

I think we can all agree that doing scutwork cannot be called fun by any means. However, as a go through residency, I think helping residents do “scut work” as a medical student has helped me 1) become more efficient when doing so 2) been educational.

For example, I’m currently a radiology resident off service on general surgery. Our med students aren’t the most interested or keen, so during the first couple of days, I updated all the DC summaries of our patients when I had some free time. This is something I did pretty often as a medical student.

I found that: 1) I actually understood what we were doing on each patient. For example, I understood why the guy with obstructive jaundice with a large central liver mass wasn’t getting any intervention or biliary drain. 2) I was able to actually offer helpful suggestions for patient plans 3) I was more engaged when rounding in the morning 4) I learnt how things I hadn’t seen before as a medical student were managed

Beyond discharge summaries, another topic that’s somewhat divisive among people I’ve asked is the idea of pre-rounding. I actually liked to pre-round on patients as a medical student (and even now) because it: 1) reminded me of who a patient was and their active issues and what things we may have to do during the day (did a consulting team forget to leave a note, did they leave a suggest that we should act on). 2) allowed me to briefly think of what I would do for each patient before hearing my seniors plan.

My personal thinking is that as a medical student you get out of it what you put into it and you are at a stage where most “scut work” is actually good learning or something you haven’t seen before. It’s arguably more helpful I would imagine for them to do it over watching aimlessly in the OR to “learn anatomy”. Radiology residency involves learning anatomy and an extremely small to non existent portion of learning happens in the OR. Obviously, exposure is also important.

I’m curious what your or your programs view of this is! My understand it’s annoying or can seem rude to give med students boring tasks but I’d argue the reason they’re boring to us is because we get effecient at them . But dithout that experience, a med student may not develop that level of efficiency.

Edit: I suppose my take away from all your comments is that this program is substantially nicer, possibly not in a good way. I agree that I wouldn’t call this “scut work” in the same way you all have described. But it does seem that some students seem to think so at least.

I think this is moreso program dependent than a generational thing. Where I did medical school, this was considered baseline and had many more tedious tasks. Interesting takeaway.