Thursday, July 10, 2008

Bridge Week Day 3

Today was a long day of hurry up and wait. We had to be at CCLCM by 7 AM, but it was mainly so that the UP students who are rotating at the Clinic could get their IDs, parking assignments, and white coats. I did get two sets of scrubs that I don't really need, and then three of my classmates and I went for breakfast. We spent the rest of the morning learning how to use EpicCare. This is the Clinic's electronic medical record, which we've been using for the past year in our longitudinal clinics. To be fair, I did learn how to do some things that I didn't already know how to do, but all in all, this morning left me feeling kind of grumpy about having to get up so early for not much value in return. At least the power was back on in the Education Building when we got there this morning.

The afternoon session was better. We got to skip the first hour, which was about the grading policy for the UP students. (The CCLCM students don't get graded, although we do get evaluations.) Afterward, we had a session to learn how to use the Clinical Assessment System (CAS) to log our patients during rotation and research blocks. I was playing around with it later, and amazingly, it's extremely easy to use. It will allow me to document all of my clinical experiences so that I can keep track of how many patients I see with various diseases, procedures I perform, and so on. We also use it to submit forms for the faculty and housestaff to evaluate us. The last event was a student panel with half a dozen fourth years from the UP. About the best advice that I heard today was to treat every rotation as if it were the specialty that I was planning to enter. I thought that was very good advice.

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