These past few days have been pretty hectic with the clinics! I spent all day monday in Urgent Care… yes, Medicine Urgent Care. I’ve got to admit, I really didn’t enjoy it. It’s the never ending clinic. At this particular clinic, patients start arriving around 7:30am and they can check in until 4:30pm. There were literally 7 interns working there with 2-3 attendings depending on the time of day. The process seems so inefficient. After seeing a patient, I still had to wait after 1-2 interns to present my patient. Then there was something wrong with my ability to sign orders, so I was back to med student status having the attendings sign my orders. After seeing a patient if they needed labs or imaging they go back in the lobby and wait for hours since those services were backed up too. Too make it even harder for us… the list keeps growing and growing! Since they can keep coming until 4:30pm, the list has no limit. We didn’t leave until 7pm!! Even more frustrating was that several of the patients use urgent care to have very non-urgent complaints attended to. I don’t know how to solve the health care crisis, but I really do believe there has got to be a better way.
Then today I got to work in the county health clinic. I love it there! The patients are an underserved population, so I saw my fair share of teenage pregnancies, late prenatal care, African American and Mexican American patients. These patients are mostly all good listeners and are just happy that I am taking the time to talk with them about their pregnancies. What sucks is the sheer number of patients that had to be seen today. Myself, an attending, and a medical student got through 52 patients today! I literally was running from one room to the next doing histories, exams, fetal doppler, cultures, wet mounts and everything else. I definitely picked up speed compared to last week’s clinic, but I know that the attending definitely picked up a little of my slack. To go from seeing maybe 3 patients in a half day as a med student to 15 as an intern is pretty steep. I managed to do 8 this AM, and another 9 in the afternoon. My goal next week is to at least get up to 12 in a half day… I’ll keep you posted!
Overall, I’m still very excited about getting to work with patients as their doctor. Part of the reason that I’m still slow is because I don’t want to lose my ability to be thorough just because I’m in a rush. I really hope to strike the balance between efficiency and accuracy.
