September 5, 2007
Oh no!
Today we practiced a few things with the surgeons like hand ties, instrument ties, instrument identification, SOAPing (medical write-up), and scrubbing/gowning/gloving. While exams often frustrate me and make me feel stupid, this was the first ‘hands-on’ thing that has done the same. I could feel the blood rushing to my face in embarrassment and anger as the surgeon marked red all over the page, telling me I had left things out and to start again (3 separate times). It was frustrating because I actually HAD included the relevant information each time, and she jumped to the conclusion that I hadn’t when it wasn’t in the order that she was looking for. But of course, the point is that my organization was lacking and that’s really what she wanted me to fix. I appreciate that because in the long run it will save me a lot of oversight and poor planning. But I just wish that she would have been a little clearer in the first place about what it was that she expected from us so that I could have been better prepared to do a good job and not look like I was fumbling through the exercise that I actually had prepared for!
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3 comments:
That sounds rough, but it is worth it to get it down pat. Everyone doing a given procedure (scrubbing, gowning, incision or suture) in the same way helps the whole process go more smoothly. When two surgeons are working together, they should be able to anticipate each other's next move, so that they can plan ahead. That is obviously easier if we all do things in the same order. This helps the operation go smoother, faster, with fewer risks of needle sticks, dropped instuments, or having to look away from the field. Plus, when the attending sees you do just one or two steps of a procedure in the expected order, they know that you know the whole thing!
--eileen
It's true, and I am all for that. I just wish that we would have been alerted ahead of time that there was a proper order to writing things...It's obvious that there's a proper order to doing procedures for all the reasons you give. And I did fine in all those things. But everyone has been telling us "everyone has their own method of doing physical exams, you'll come up with your own"...and we were given an example SOAP, but we were NEVER told that we were expected to follow the exact order that Dr. M had given us (in fact, key points had been left out of the example for us to divine out of thin air!!!)....arg.
Oh, the SOAP note...frankly I wouldn't care about the order if people would take the time to write legibly! As it is, I find myself thinking, well, they probably should be talking about the heart here, so maybe they mean....
It doesn't even matter much these days, because everyone uses pre-printed fill in the blank type forms.
Don't you just love all the abbreviations to decode? it makes figuring things out that much harder :o(
eileen
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