Patient Care
Today’s clinical was interesting, as usual. To start my day, I decided to take care of one of my evaluations that’s required this semester. I needed to spend a few hours working in reception to learn how the patient flow works within the facility. I spent about 3 hours this morning doing that. One of the techniques we use to make sure we have the patient that matches the paperwork when we take someone back to the examination and consultation area is to ask them their date of birth. We know instantly if we have a mismatch if the DOB doesn’t match the paperwork. When I asked one of our patients this morning for her date of birth, she couldn’t tell me. When I asked, she just looked puzzled and didn’t say anything to me. I thought she either couldn’t hear me or didn’t understand what I asked, so I asked again. Her son was with her for her examination, and he informed me that she was an Alzheimer’s patient. I felt like an idiot, and I didn’t know what to say next. Luckily, the lady who I was working with bailed me out by taking over the conversation at that point. I didn’t do anything wrong, but I was simply caught off guard. I guess this was just an example of what I’m going to be faced with throughout my career in the healthcare industry. I’m not upset about anything other than my inability to quickly respond to a difficult situation. That’s why I’m here though. I have to learn these things.
The second surprise I had today was when my clinical coordinator showed up on site. It’s not out of the ordinary for this to happen, and I had actually been expecting to see her. The problem was that she showed up to test my competency on using the equipment in one of the clinical site exam rooms. I knew this was coming, but I wasn’t expecting it until week 7 or 8 of this 8-week session. Since I did know it was coming, I spoke with my preceptor this morning about it, and he actually started showing me the equipment in one of the rooms. The only equipment I’m fully familiar with so far is the room that has only an upright machine. I needed to show competency on one of the table units, so he started showing me the ropes. We got interrupted with some exams that had to be done, so he stopped after he had shown me the controller and said we would come back to it when we got caught back up. Just as we got caught back up, my coordinator arrived and wanted to test me. I didn’t complain about the early arrival of this test (well.. not too much) and I bit the bullet and took the test. My preceptor told her he hadn’t finished training me on that equipment yet, but she thought I should go ahead and take the competency test. I made 100% on the test, so now I’m glad it’s behind me :)
The only thing I didn’t get done today that I had hoped for was a couple pre-comps on chest and abdominal exams. My work in reception, the equipment training, and then the equipment competency test kept me from being able to do a couple CXRs that came in this morning. The other student who is at this location with me got 4 pre-comps on the chest today, one of which was a pediatric exam. Hopefully I’ll get some pre-comps next Thursday.
I’m still loving the clinical experience. The people I’m with are great and I’m learning a ton…