Traditional Rounds

An update on my November...

This month is internal medicine at Mission Hospital. I am with another pharmacy student this month and its nice to share the work. She and I arrive at the hospital around 0800 and spend a couple hours looking up patients in the computer. We check their labs, read their history, check their meds, make sure things are dosed properly, make sure their using the right antibiotics, make sure they didn't forget something the patient was on at home, etc.

At 1000 we normally go to Rounds with the Family Medicine Team. There are several first year interns and a third year senior resident plus their attending physician for the week. They each present their patients and we discuss what to do for them. As pharmacy representatives, we're there to bring up any issues we saw when we were looking up patients, and address any questions they have during their discussion. After rounds, most days we go to lunch and then maybe have a topic discussion with our preceptor. Usually though, by the end of the day we have discovered 6 more things we didn't know we didn't know about from rounds and have to go look them up. I'm living in a state of overwhelmed and stressed this month!

Anywho, this morning our attending wanted to do full team, traditional, walk rounds. So we all met at 0700, no one had looked at their patients, and we proceeded to walk all over the hospital and talk about (and examine) all 14 of our patients. 0700 - 1300 (6 HOURS!) of rounding on people. Oh it was awful. I don't think I learned anything, I didn't have a chance to look at the patients before hand so I was totally unprepared, grr. Not my favorite format, and I discovered once again why I don't want to be a doctor. No touching people for me, thank you.