How to choose a hospital for MIR: Complete Guide 2026

Choosing a hospital for your MIR residency is one of the most important decisions in your medical career. It's not just about your ranking number or generic rankings: it's about finding the place where you'll spend 4 to 5 years of your life, training as a specialist.

The 3 pillars you should evaluate

Based on the experiences of hundreds of residents, we've identified three fundamental dimensions you should consider:

1. Training

•Quality of teaching and supervision
•Variety and quality of rotations
•Possibilities for external rotations (national and international)
•Access to clinical sessions, courses and conferences
•Progressive autonomy and learning curve

2. Work

•Real workload (not just what the program says)
•Number of monthly shifts and their intensity
•Work environment and relationship with attendings
•Available resources (materials, staff, technology)
•Respect for post-shift rest

3. Quality of life

•Cost of living in the city
•Ease of finding housing nearby
•Public transportation and accessibility
•Leisure and social life options
•Work-life balance possibilities

What nobody tells you (but you should know)

There's information that doesn't appear in official programs or open house events. This is the information that really makes a difference:

→The "24-hour" shifts that are actually 30 hours

→Real supervision vs. theoretical supervision

→The atmosphere between residents of different years

→How the most in-demand rotations are really distributed

→The actual policy on days off and vacations

How to get reliable information

The traditional problem has been that hospital information circulates in a fragmented way: WhatsApp groups, rumors, the typical "someone told me". This leads to decisions based on incomplete or biased information.

That's why we created Veralia: a platform where residents can share their experiences anonymously and in a structured way, generating aggregated and verified information that helps those who come after make better decisions.

Questions you should ask

If you have the opportunity to talk to current residents, these are the questions that really matter:

1How many actual shifts do you do per month?
2Are post-shift rest periods respected?
3What's the supervision like in your first year?
4Have you been able to do external rotations?
5Would you choose this hospital again?
6What has surprised you the most (positively and negatively)?
7What's the atmosphere like between residents and attendings?

How to choose a hospital for MIR