Surgery Booking Day

We have clinic 3 days a week at a certain city hospital where the majority of patients are Medicaid and Medicare. As a result, we are told as residents that these are our patients, and we can treat them in whatever way we deem necessary. All residents need a certain number of procedures in order to graduate from the program. We are told that this hospital is the place to get our numbers by seeking out patients that we can book for certain procedures, and then performing those procedures on them. There is always an attending in the OR with us, so we are not actually performing the procedures alone, but these are clinic patients, and as a result, we are able to choose which procedures we want to do on the patients, and we are allowed to actually perform the majority of the procedure in the OR. I know that the idea of a resident performing a procedure on you is frightening, but this really is not the worst of it. We do need the exeprience in order to practice in future, and to be honest, a well trained monkey can perform most of these procedures. The difficult part of medicine is deciding which patients actually necessitate a procedure, and which procedure to perform on them. Unfortunately, residents always want to perform procedures because they need their numbers. Physicians are not going to let them practice on their private patients, so we practice on the clinic patients instead. We are told that one clinic day in particular is supposed to be our "surgery booking day." On this day, we are encouraged..well forced..to try extra hard to find patients to book for surgery, and if we do not book enough for that day, we are ridiculed by our attending for not trying hard enough. Something is wrong with this picture.