Residency Reform

Truly today's resident faces the "buzzing brain," which Churchill so aptly described almost 40 years ago. The expansion of medical knowledge and technology have created vast new areas of required mastery for those in postgraduate medical education programs. Regardless of the type of residency training taken, young physicians face prodigious intellectual and physical problems. An ever expanding universe of information coupled with arduous work schedules have produced a generation of residents who seek relief by specializing in ever smaller areas of expertise, or by joining large multispecialty group practices or Health Maintenance Organizations where their work requirement can be tightly regulated. As we have pointed out in two previous editorials in the Archives, the medical revolution in knowledge and technology occurring today requires changes in premedical and medical education.¹,²No less important are required reforms in postgraduate medical education. PROBLEM OF NIGHT CALL Recent events in New York City