Jammed: Full into Capacity

Our Junior Clerkship will officially start tomorrow. I am excited at the same time nervous and anticipating how the day will turn out. Will I receive my first dose of our preceptors’ or residents’ anger because I was not doing well? I am crossing my fingers and praying that everything will turn out fine tomorrow and for the rest of my life as I traverse the medical field. This is it, there’s no backing out!

Goals of Junior Clerkship:
1. To expose us to clinical medicine.
2. To learn how to be part of the medical team.
3. To improve on taking accurate history and physical examination.
4. To introduce us on principles of developing a management/treatment plan for various diagnoses.

Our responsibilities:
1. Perform a history and physical examination on new admissions assigned by the resident team. We’ve been trained since first year on how to come up with a concise but accurate history and physical examination. But I am not confident yet on my history-taking, there are a lot of things to improve.
2. Assist the resident team in simple procedures and become familiar with these procedures. Sometimes, they will teach you for your first exposure, but on the second, they’ll let you do the procedure on your own.
3. Present patients at rounds. So we are expected to read thoroughly on these patients prior to presentation.
4. Submit write-ups for patients using the format requested by the medical school to the preceptor for formal evaluation. I have to admit that I am very lazy at taking notes, I can just photocopy from my classmates’ anyway. But this time, I should take an effort to improve my writing skills.
5. Be up to date and familiar with the patients’ pertinent development and write daily progress notes. Progress notes must be discussed with and countersigned by the assigned intern or resident.
5. Accompany patients to special procedures and participate in discussions with consultants whenever possible

And of course these responsibilities will also include being punctual as possible and performing all the duties with accuracy, good judgment and care.

*Sigh* Listing all these makes me even more nervous. Truly, being a doctor, or a medical student for that matter, entails a lot of responsibilities.

The start of our clerkship will also mean an idle blog (this one). I may not find the time to post as frequent as I used to.

I will be assigned to the obstetrics department, one of the busiest. Good luck to me.

Medicine, Personal Medicine, Personal