Clinical Experience #1: Family Practice

The start of my clinical year is only 4 months away (eek!) but luckily I don’t have to wait until then to see real patients.  We started our “clinical assessment” course this week- which is where we travel to different clinical sites in the area and hang with the PAs & doctors.  Basically we could end up shadowing, seeing patients with our classmate, or seeing patients on our OWN (with the provider following up of course).

This week I went to a family practice in the area.  No shadowing or messing around here, but rather “you go ahead and see this patient.”  We’ve had plenty of OSCEs (where we see standardized patients at school) so I wasn’t that worried and I feel pretty comfortable taking a history.  Managing patients and knowing exactly what to do with them… that’s another story!  Obviously it’s a little soon for us to be doing that on our own, but I did learn a lot.  

I saw patients with chest pain, breathing problems due to COPD, and wait for it….. erectile dysfunction.  Yeah, you could say I was a little nervous when I saw that last chart.  First of all, we haven’t even gone over men’s health yet so I have a very general knowledge of ED.  Second of all, I was like “oh God I hope this isn’t awkward”.  Well, I can gladly say it wasn’t.  My patient was super nice & very comfortable talking about that so everything went smoothly!

It was a little intimidating at times, but I would say it was a successful first day seeing real patients with real complaints.  We have a women’s health OSCE today and I definitely feel more comfortable when it comes to interacting with patients, especially after being out in the community.  Stay tuned for more fun stories from the next few clinical sites: surgery, inpatient internal medicine at the hospital, and urgent care!