I am not an english major, but I seem to think perjorative means bad.
:tongue:
Anyway, a community program is a program that may, or may not, have a university affiliation, but is not part of an university hospital, or academic medical center. 90-100% of your teaching is from orthopods in private practice. More emphasis is put on clinical orthopaedics and surgical technique than academic orthopaedics and research.
You will never find yourself as a chief running the show with a pg3 and pg4 assisting you while your attending bounces from room to room. However, you will also never find yourself as 2nd, 3rd, or 4th assist. You will be 1st assist on almost 100% of your cases while in residency. Obviously, you will be given more autonomy as the attendings get to know you and your skills develop.
Anyway, as you can tell, I have put a lot of research in to community programs and will most likely be community bound when this thing is all said and done. The benefits I see in community programs is earlier operative experience, better lifestyles and benefit packages, less scut (community hospitals typically have great ancillary staff to handle the scut), and less research. Keep in mind, these are generalizations and do not apply to every community program, or every academic program.
If you have any other questions about specific programs, throw them out and I will answer to the best of my ability.
