obstetrics experience

[larryj]

I am interested in hearing FP residents experiences with obstetrics, specifically how the OB service is run.

Do you have patients that are specifically assigned to you for delivery?

Are you required to "recruit" your own deliveries, by asking obstetricians and FPs from the community to allow you to deliver their patients?

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[njbmd]

Hi there,
I am not a Family Practice resident but I have a very good friend who is an attending physician in Family Practice who does deliveries. She has tailored her practice so that she does no more than 5 or 6 deliveries per month. She says that to do more takes too much time away from her very busy office practice. She trained at Georgetown and is on faculty there. She gets most of her obstetrical patients from other patient referrals. She has to turn down more than she delivers because of sheer time constraints. She sees many whole families of patients and enjoys taking care of the patients from OB to pediatrics to health maintenence to geriatrics. She has an extraordinarily busy solo practice and runs her own clinic. In addition she also does procedures in the Family Medicine Clinic at Georgetown Family Practice Center. She is able to do things like colpos and the like. What she does not do to any great extent is cover hospitalized patients. She has an agreement with a couple of hospitalists who cover her patients when they are admitted to the hospital for anything other than OB-Gyn. She refers to a Gyn surgeon for radical cancer surgeries and the like but runs a full-service obstetrics including C-sections and fairly complicated deliveries. I hope that this gives you some insight into incorporating OB-Gyn with your Family Practice.

njbmd

 

[ramonaquimby]

I have a very good friend who is an attending physician in Family Practice who does deliveries. In addition she also does procedures in the Family Medicine Clinic at Georgetown Family Practice Center.

njbmd , do you still keep in contact with this friend? do you think she would mind talking to a fellow SDNer?

 

[sophiejane]

That sounds like the absolute dream practice...

sigh...

 

[sophiejane]

...and from my limited experience, I would think most OBs would be extremely protective of their turf. I'm on OBGYN right now and every time I mention wanting to be an FP that does OB they scowl and start rattling off all the reasons why that's a very bad idea.

But in real life, I've seen plenty of (mainly rural) FPs with plenty of deliveries and happy patients--no recruiting necessary.

 

[msparkysteffen]

I am a second-year resident at Iowa Lutheran Family Practice residency in Des Moines IA and at our residency we do a fair amount of OB. At our residency clinic we have more than enough OB patients to go around and do not have to "recruit" patients. As residents we follow our own OB's do all of their prenatal care and delivery. We are staffed by one of our family medicine faculty at the time of the delivery. Currently I have 13 active OB patients and the numbers for each resident vary from 8-19 active OB patients. We have a very good relationship with our OB/Gyn group who are available in the event that we need to go to section. We also as a residency run a free clinic for pregnant hispanic patients with no health insurance and the residents are responsible for delivering all of these women and there are a lot as each week we do 7 new OB work-ups. I hope that this gives you some insights into how things work at a residency if you have any more questions feel free to post or PM your reply