HSE Internship Year

NOG92

Hi, I was wondering if anyone has any experience of internship year with the HSE after graduation? Basically, I have a few questions mainly relating to the work schedule:

1. Can you choose what areas/hospitals in which to do the intern year?
2. What does a typical working week look like, i.e., are working hours and days of shifts fixed from week to week or do they change?
3. Is there much flexibility in the hours and days of the week you work (i.e., can you express a preference for working days/hrs) or are they simply allocated to you by the hospital?

If anyone has any advice or experiences they'd like to share on any of the above I'd really appreciate it! :) Míle Buíochas!

RoamingDoc

1. You rank about 25 or so posts from a big list. They then give you the highest preference they can based on your class ranking. If they can't give you one of your top 25, they'll try to find something else for you. Each post will list out the constituent placements (specialities and hospitals) for a fixed number of months and all of the placements within one post add up to one year.
2. Base hours are around 39/week, on paper starting at 9 and finishing at 5 (4 on Fridays). This is pretty variable and individual teams or hospitals can and do have different patterns (e.g a lot of surgeons will start earlier than this). Tyically the pattern for a standard week tends to stay the same but being on-call (during which you will have to physically be on site) changes that a little - again, hospital and/or department dependent.
3. Extremely little flexibility, the hours are generally the hours. Your experience with how flexible the on-call rota can be might allow preferences to be expressed to some extent but it's really a give and take with colleagues and everything should be fair.

NOG92

Cheers for the reply! Really appreciate it 🙌