Quantification and perception of on-call podiatric surgical resident workload.

The general assumption inherent to the design of podiatric surgical residency programs is that all residents will have comparable experiences in terms of patient care interactions and workload throughout their training. Despite this, there is usually the perception that certain residents consistently have greater or smaller workloads when on-call and are considered "black clouds" or "white clouds," respectively. During a prospective investigational period of 1 year, on-call podiatric residents at a level 1 trauma center recorded their workload on a nightly basis in terms of three variables: pages/telephone calls, consultations, and hospital admissions. The results of these data suggest that all residents shared a similar workload during the study period without a clinically significant "black cloud" or "white cloud." However, a difference was found in the perception of which resident was a "black cloud" or "white cloud."