Thursday, September 21, 2006

Clinical Block Orientation-Day 1

We had a whole day of orientation today to prepare us for our first clinical block, which is cardiovascular/pulmonary/renal. It was kind of painful for us--we've really gotten accustomed to not sitting there listening to someone lecture for hours and hours. But today we got a real earful. We started out at 7:30 AM in the library, and happily they had bagels and fruit for us. At 8:00, Dr. Drake, the anatomy professor, came to take us to the anatomy lab, where he explained how the class would work. Afterward, we went back to the library, and Dr. Prayson, the histology/pathology prof, worked with us on those slides I was looking at a couple of days ago for about an hour and a half. The class was divided into teams, and he asked each team questions about the slides. My team actually won somehow, and our prize was tic-tacs.

After that, the cardiologists and pulmonologists who are running this block came to tell us about our schedule, and Dr. Hull (one of the CCLCM education directors) came to tell us about the homework questions we have to complete each week. They're called SAQs and CAPPs, and I'll tell you more about them after I've actually done some. Our final speaker for the morning was Dr. Moravec, who runs the process of discovery (POD) series. This is a seminar series where we have a member of the faculty come to speak to us each week about their research. It is supposed to tie in to whatever we're studying at the time, so we're going to be hearing from some cardio people at the beginning. Dr. Moravec herself is a cardiology researcher, and she is our first speaker.

During lunch, the bookstore people came to sell us our equipment. We have to buy stethoscopes of course, and then some other things like eye cards and babinski hammers. We also have to have a tuning fork. I'm not quite sure yet what I'll be doing with a tuning fork, but I'm curious to find out. After that, we heard from the physicians who will be teaching us clinical skills, and they also told us about our longitudinal preceptors. We'll start going to the clinics during the second week of the block. The next speaker was Dr. Goldman, who is a pharmacist. He'll be teaching us pharmacology. I thought it was pretty cool that we have a pharmacist as a prof, and he was a really funny guy. The last thing we did was a workshop about portfolios, because in a few weeks we have to do our first formative portfolios so that we can discuss our progress with our PAs. They gave us a fake set of evals for a hypothetical student and asked us to practice determining his strengths and weaknesses in small groups, as well as to come up with plans to improve. All I can say is that it's a lot easier to do this for someone else versus for yourself!

We finally got out at 5:30, and I am just brain-dead. Tomorrow thankfully our orientation is only for half a day, and then we are off for break for a week.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

TUning forks depend on the frequency. some are used for testing hearing Rinne's test and Weber's test.
Others are used for testing the sensation of vibration to determine sensroy neural deficits. Talley and O'Connor Clinical examintation is an excellent book for further explanation and for all clinical skills and history taking.