The CRI and PGME would like to thank everyone engaged in this massive effort to ensure patient care in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Residents, administrators, program directors, service chiefs, faculty, departmental chiefs, and chairs –̀ưthank you!
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PGME and our COVID relief coordinators will continue to provide weekly updates of resident availability and hospital need even in the absence of redeployment |
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PGY1s cannot be first call without in-house senior supervision as per article 12.08 of the FMRQ contract: When call duty is performed in an establishment, the resident, in the six (6) months following the start of his residency, shall be able to count at all times on the presence, on-site, of a physician who is a member of the Council of Physicians, Dentists and Pharmacists or of a resident other than a Resident 1. |
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Residents should be freed for their academic half-days during their COVID relief assignments. |
COVID Relief Assignments
If your program has been selected for COVID relief, you will be sent the COVID Relief Assignment excel to complete and send to the COVID relief initiative coordinators (redeployment.pgme [at] mcgill.ca) indicating the residents available for COVID relief assignment.
Please ensure to:
- Confirm with those residents involved their availability for COVID relief before sending CRIC your final excel spreadsheet. The CRIC assumes that if you have added a name to the excel spreadsheet then that resident can be redeployed.
- Identify where your resident is rotating. Ideally, the CRIC will attempt to redeploy within the same site.
- Confirm when you host your academic half days on the availability excel spread sheet
- Remember that residents can be sent for a COVID relief initiative assignment to any of our training sites and affiliated hospitals (such as Lachine and Lakeshore).
- Inform PGME (redeployment.pgme [at] mcgill.ca) if your residents are not allowed to care for COVID patients due to the specific patient populations your specialty cares for – for example, immunocompromised and or oncological patients.
Assignment Rules
It is very important to highlight the following rules:
- When you are assigned to provide residents for a given two-period block, CRIC assumes you will provide residents that are active in your program. If residents in your program train in other specialties or in the common training stream, it is your responsibility to verify if they are available for redeployment.
- In order to avoid confusion, please ensure that this is in fact the case by contacting the rotation director to ensure that they are aware that said resident will be on COVID relief initiative assignment for 7 days and the resident’s call will be covered by colleagues and faculty.
- For example, psychiatry has a mandatory 1-period endocrinology rotation as part their foundation phase of training. If the psychiatry program director assigns a resident for COVID relief during the endocrinology rotation, it is the psychiatry program director’s responsibility to to inform the endocrinology rotation director that the psychiatry resident will be completing a one 1 week redeployment on a COVID unit.
- It is not the resident’s responsibility to find coverage for their call.
- If your residents have to spend more than 6 periods in internal medicine (IM) as part of their training requirements (for example: radiology, ophthalmology and dermatology, radio-oncology but not neurology), IM will manage redeployment and your residents will be counted as IM residents for the time they are training in IM.
- Availability does not equal redeployment: It is important to note that residents who are made available for a given week for COVID relief should be freed from call obligations. However, they might not be redeployed the following week and, as such, unless confirmed for COVID relief by COVID service chiefs, are expected in their usual rotation to continue fulfilling their expected training requirements.
- Participation is compulsory. A resident who refuses redeployment will be placed on unauthorized leave of absence.
75% Rule
COVID relief initiative assignments are considered part of the resident’s rotation; as such, absences must be documented, and the 75% rule of attendance must be respected.
- COVID relief can be considered part of the total time of a resident’s rotation and not counted as time away from their rotation. However, program directors in consultation with the resident’s competency committees and the host rotation directors must ensure that a resident’s learning experience is meaningful.
- Consider the following scenario: If a resident is in a one-period rotation of four weeks, takes a week off and is assigned a week of COVID relief, that leaves 2 weeks for the rotation. Perhaps residents in the situation above should not be redeployed during that period and redeployed at a later time.
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