What moonlighting did/do you perform during your residency?

[empathy]

Staff of the PM&R Resident recently posed the question – “What moonlighting did/do you perform during your residency?”

While a resident at Mayo clinic, I worked as an overnight physician at a federal prison and weekend shifts at an urgent care center.
Luis Baerga-Varela, MD, Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation

http://www.aapmr.org/resident/newslttr/05spring10.htm

[Natacha]

This might seem like a silly question, but what is moonlighting? I am new to the term...

[tRmedic21]

Moonlighting is a way to make extra money diring your residency, and it can be very VERY lucrative at times. I recently heard one of our attendings here discussing the situation with one of our residents. He said if you wanted to work one night a week in-house at the hospital (over and above your call and residency requirements, of course), it would amount to about $40k or more a year in extra income... which is roughly the same as a year's salary for a resident! For one night a week!

Moonlighting is available in many different forms. For instance, say you have gone into a residency that is somewhat long (Gen Surg is 5 years) and you have to enter loan repayment after 3 years, but you are still making resident salary. If you are eligible for unrestricted licensure in your state (not to be compared with board certification), then you can get such a license and you can work as a physician in many different capacities. You could work one or two nights a month at an ER in a smaller town. You could cover GS call in the same kind of situation. My old hospital used to pay over $100 an hour for this coverage, and it was a relatively small and non-stressful ER. We had the residents from our local med school's program there on a regular basis, as well as FP and IM docs covering us from other towns who wanted to make some extra cash. In small places like that, they just want bodies to see the patients, board cert was not an issue. Heck, our ER director wasn't ER Board Certified... he was a DO FP doc. Weekend nights were particularly easy shifts to find, since the crazies come out AND the regular ER docs want to be at home. another opportunity is covering in-house call (as described above), in which case you may not need an unrestriced license, as you may be covered by your training license. Also in both of these scenarios, malpractice would likely be covered by the facility.

Some people have talked about being in-house just so the hospital can perform certain procedures which require an MD in-house at all times (not necessarily board-certified or even state licensed). I have heard of these being jobs where you check in, go to sleep and make $25-50 an hour to do NOTHING. Seriously.

Some people do discharge summaries for other physicians. This is not as lucrative, but it can be done. My hospital where I used to work even had physicians on salary after recruiting them to come work after residency. I know of both a cardiologist and an anesthesiologist who each made an extra $100k a year in each of their last couple years of residency because they had signed contracts to come work at our facility. Not bad.

Hope this gives you some ideas, just know that there are lots of opportunities out there, and alot of it depends on your state, your type of residency program, and the 80-hour workweek.

Good luck!

[Natacha]

Thank you for that detailed information. It was very enlightening.
If you would be so kind as to also inform me on what state, in your opinion, is the best for these types of opportunities?