Part 5: Advice from the experts: Helpful information for current residents

In this series, experts in the field advise current residents and offer insight into how they can make the most of their time and experience moving forward with their careers.

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Alfredo Sadun, MD, PhD:

Well, first of all, I should say, for full disclosure, I was the residency program director for 26 years at one of the largest institutions for the USCLA County. And I did give advice to my residents, whether it was good or not is up to their judgment. But the advice was to continue to learn. And the process of investigating by learning is the only way to stay on top of things. And so I would always do the same thing. I would tell them here, and I'd pull a random book out of my library, and I would crack it open and say, you see this piece of information, it's going to be irrelevant in 20 years. So you don't need to learn that. But what you do need to know is every patient you've seen, what they had, keep reading those papers every year as you get 20 years down the line, you'll still be on top of it. So keep reading.

Valerie Biousse, MD:

Residents, I think, are in a very difficult situation in general, because the number of patients who come to emergency departments with visual complaints that require an ophthalmology consultation at night or during the weekend keeps increasing everywhere. And in most academic centers, the first line call is the ophthalmology resonant on call. And they are often quite good, but you know, they are in training, they are not very comfortable, and they have to evaluate patients in the ED in often very difficult conditions. This is one of the reason why I think that having cameras that combine color photo and OCT in an ED is absolutely essential because it saves the resident's life. And my advice to the resident is try to encourage your department, your leaders, to obtain such a camera so that you have access to ophthalmic imaging in the emergency department when you are on call, the cameras have two impacts on residents–main impacts. One, it increases their level of confidence, because it's a lot easier to make a diagnosis when you have access to ocular imaging, especially OCT. Second, when they don't know what to do instead of panicking in the middle of the night, or instead of making a mistake, they can just call the attending who is backing them up and ask for help, and the attending can indeed, truly help them, because they can have access remotely to the pictures. So this would be my main advice to residents.