Dr. James Knutson winced when the voice crackled over his pager. Someone’s heart had stopped. It was Knutson’s first day as a medical resident at Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital. He had been there just four hours, but would have to respond. He ran up three flights, his heart pounding, and scrambled to the doorway of the patient’s room. Knutson wasn’t needed. Others had already begun to restart the patient’s heart. “I got there just after the real doctors took over,” he said. Knutson is a real doctor — he just doesn’t feel like one yet. But he’s working on it. So are seven other residents, or interns, in the region’s only full-service hospital who are working, learning and healing as doctors-in-training for the next 12 months. In pursuit of their state medical licenses, they will rotate among the hospital’s different units — inpatient care, surgery, critical care, outpatient clinics, the emergency room, and electives of their choice. As medical students, they observed and studied other doctors. Now, having graduated from medical school, they will for the first time write their own orders, send for their own lab tests, and dictate their own treatment plans. They will be guided and watched, but for the first time, people’s lives will be in their hands. Knutson, 30, was one of the three residents on call that first night in June. He would be at the hospital until 10 p.m. — a 14-hour day — responding to non-life threatening emer ...
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Dr. James Knutson winced when the voice crackled over his pager. Someone’s heart had stopped. It was Knutson’s first day as a medical resident at Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital. He had been there just four hours, but would have to respond. He ran up three flights, his heart pounding, and scrambled to the doorway of the patient’s room. Knutson wasn’t needed. Others had already begun to restart the patient’s heart. “I got there just after the real doctors took over,” he said. Knutson is a real doctor — he just doesn’t feel like one yet. But he’s working on it. So are seven other residents, or interns, in the region’s only full-service hospital who are working, learning and healing as doctors-in-training for the next 12 months. In pursuit of their state medical licenses, they will rotate among the hospital’s different units — inpatient care, surgery, critical care, outpatient clinics, the emergency room, and electives of their choice. As medical students, they observed and studied other doctors. Now, having graduated from medical school, they will for the first time write their own orders, send for their own lab tests, and dictate their own treatment plans. They will be guided and watched, but for the first time, people’s lives will be in their hands. Knutson, 30, was one of the three residents on call that first night in June. He would be at the hospital until 10 p.m. — a 14-hour day — responding to non-life threatening emer ...