After commuting 60 miles round trip to the Texas Medical Center for a year, my Family Medicine rotation has given me an incredibly nice reprieve – the clinic I’ll be working at is down the street from my old high school and pre-school. Basically, it’ll be a 15 minute commute back to my roots. *nostalgia* 🙂
Rather than the thorough “hospital history”, primary care outpatient visits require one to take a more “focused” history because of limited time. We covered the nuances of five types of patient encounters during today’s orientation: new problem, checkup, chronic disease, psychosocial, and change in behavior. The clerkship director has also decided to completely drop the Family Medicine shelf exam. Previously, my colleagues had to take it as a pass/fail assessment, but I’ve lucked out and won’t have to bother with that at all. 😀 The director’s justification was reminicent of my complaints – he feels our grade should be determined based on how we handle actual patient encounters and investigate questions using the literature.
So I’m off to my first day of clinic in six hours. Here’s hoping I set a good first impression. 🙂
