The Pros and Cons of Being Treated at a Teaching Hospital

What is a Teaching Hospital?

A teaching hospital is a hospital that affiliated with a university medical school and is responsible for the clinical training of the medical students of that university. A teaching hospital will also accept new medical school graduate students for residency programs to complete their medical training and fellows, who are post residency doctors looking for specialized training to become accredited in a particular field of medical specialty.

There are some pros and cons to being treated at a teaching hospital that you may want to consider before deciding on which hospital is best suited for the medical care for you and your family.

The Cons of Being Treated at A Teaching Hospital

When you are treated at a teaching hospital, the bulk of the physician time you will spend will be with a trainee, whether that be a resident or a fellow. This applies to inpatient and outpatient care alike. In the inpatient setting, residents and fellows from the various medical specialties appropriate to your care will come by your room, examine you, stay abreast of the details in your medical chart, and order any necessary tests or medications, as authorized by their attending physician. The attending physician will still do rounds, and will check on you from time to time, but you will have more personal time with the trainees assigned to that physician.

While the residents and fellows will be obligated to have all their medical decisions approved by the doctor assigned to supervise them, and that doctor will have to sign off on their assessment of your care, there can be some downsides to having the details of your condition filtered to your doctor through a third party, particularly one with less experience than they have.

The same can be said for your care at a teaching hospital in the outpatient setting. If you show up for an appointment with a specialist at a teaching hospital, you will spend the largest portion of your visit with a resident or fellow, before their assessment is shared with the doctor, who will then come into the examination room and review their findings with you and to help develop a plan for your care.

It can be argued that the lack of direct observation by the attending physician during most of your outpatient or inpatient care can limit your ability to present some of the finer details of your condition to an experienced healthcare professional. The senior doctor is not present to pick up on some of the nuances of what you are reporting or make an inspired observation that can only be made first hand.

The Pros of Being Treated at A Teaching Hospital

Most U.S. teaching hospitals also place a strong emphasis on research, and tend to be among the nation's most cutting edge medical facilities. Breakthroughs in medical care and new inventions to prolong life and improve the safety of medical procedures are often debuted in teaching hospitals, with great success. Simply having your care managed in a teaching hospital can place you in an excellent position to receive the latest innovations in healthcare.

And, despite the concerns about having much of your care assessed and managed by medical residents and fellows that are listed in the "cons" section of this article, there are some undeniable potential benefits to having an energetic healthcare advocate. First of all, the residents and fellows are well supervised, in a medical training program, the basic template for which has been in place for centuries. Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly, for a trainee new to the medical profession, a complicated medical problem can be an exciting opportunity to learn something new and possibly elevate their experience in terms of knowledge and discovery. It is extremely difficult to compete with the enthusiasm and willingness to explore, to ask questions, and to investigate a problem that a young resident or fellow is more likely than a seasoned attending physician may be.

Whether or not you choose to be treated at a teaching hospital or not, it is important to have all the information you need to make this important decision about your medical care. It is important to know that, should you choose to be treated at a teaching hospital, you have the right to request that the attending physician on duty be present for your care at any time.