What is it about?
A survey of plastic surgery program directors revealed that just one third of residency programs surveyed have a formal maternity leave policy, despite the increasing number of women training in plastic surgery. Most of the maternity leave policies in place failed to enumerate emergency call coverage, work expectations according to weeks of gestation, and breast feeding allowances. Program directors face the contradiction between the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), giving a woman the legal right to 12 weeks’ maternity leave, and plastic surgery training requirements of 48 work weeks per year. The lack of maternity support may contribute to a higher maternal and fetal health risks, a higher elective abortion rate, greater infertility rates, and unintended childlessness. Among the suggested solutions are adopting a standardized maternity leave policy and greater training time flexibility.
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Why is it important?
While only 14% of plastic surgeons are women at the time of publication, 37% of trainees are female. The long years and long hours of training combined with a lack of maternity support means that many women either face a high risk of pregnancy complications during training, or they face a heightened risk of infertility if they wait to complete training before starting a family. Implementing maternity support will be difficult, but the human cost of not doing so is too great.
Perspectives
As a woman plastic surgeon, I've witnessed first hand the colliding interests of the demands of training with the desire to have a family. Having co-residents cover for a resident with a complicated pregnancy creates resentment, and some women terminate their pregnancies so they don't burden their co-residents or lose their jobs. Infertility and unintended childlessness is too often the outcome of devoting peak fertile years to training. With more women going into plastic surgery, my co-authors and I suggested solutions so that women don't have to continue to be shoe-horned into a male reproductive model during training. We're hoping some day pregnancy won't merely be tolerated, but encouraged.
Dr. Heather J Furnas
Stanford University Medical Center
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Pregnancy and the Plastic Surgery Resident, Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery, January 2017, Wolters Kluwer Health,
DOI: 10.1097/prs.0000000000002861.
You can read the full text:
Resources
“Pregnancy in Plastic Surgery Residents” Plastic Surgery Hot Topics with Rod J. Rohrich, MD
Dr. Rod Rohrich, editor-in-chief of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, summarizes the paper, Pregnancy and the Plastic Surgery Resident.
Discussion: Pregnancy and the Plastic Surgery Resident
In this discussion of the article, Pregnancy and the Plastic Surgery Resident, the authors expand on the importance of developing maternity policies to support pregnancy during plastic surgery training. "It takes a village to raise a child. The same is true for training a physician, a surgeon, a plastic surgeon. The village that helps to raise a child and the village that helps to train a physician ought to overlap. For many residents, they do not. That is our own fault. We are in charge of our culture."
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