Do doctors have sick days?

Question

What if a doctor is sick, and can't go into work? What happens to all his appointments? Are they all just rescheduled or does he call in like a "sub" doctor or something?

Answer 1

Most of the time you work sick.  In my Residency, if you were too sick to work, you HAD to be admitted.  In severe instances, you can usually call on a colleague to see your hospital patients for you, and cancel the office appointments.  In over 30 years, I missed 2 days of work for sickness.  And that was because I was in ICU myself.  

Answer 2

Where I work, it's a combination of fitting some of the patients into other people's schedules on the same day and rescheduling others.

One of the other posters pointed out that physicians don't often take sick days.  The mindset drummed into you from residency is that only the "weak" need to take time off.  Real men (and women) suck it up and deal!

In my opinion, that's just plain stupid.  First of all, do you really want your doctor coughing in your face?  I remember when I was doing a surgical rotation in med school that one of the surgeons was coughing behind his surgical mask.  I would not want to be the patient under the knife!  Secondly, what kind of example are we setting for our patients?

Obviously we don't want to take time off for frivolous reasons.  Personal illness, though, should be taken seriously.

Answer 3

they get subs for them if they cant them n there all just lost

Answer 4

lol... I wish I remembered what a sick day was.  It's really, really difficult for physicians to have a "sick" day simply because our primary responsibility is to our patients.  But when we're really badly injured or incapacitated, then there are occasions when procedures have to be rescheduled or appointments have to be cancelled.  But frankly, physicians don't have the luxury of doing this too often.  During residency training, the bottom line was that if you even think about calling out sick, you'd better be in a hospital bed.  Physicians simply don't have the sort of lifestyle where having a mild illness will allow us to skip out on our patients, it's just the nature of the profession.

Answer 5

they always have a substitute doctor or medical assistant to take care of the patients.