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UC rotation over EM rotation?


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My program is sending me to an Urgent Care rotation (not attached to an ER) in place of  an ER rotation; my advisor is telling me they don't have enough ER sites for everyone.  I'm not happy at all about this but don't know if this is really a problem; I wasn't planning on going into EM, but, I'm also trying to keep an open mind about rotations and feel like this puts me at a disavantage later on.  Any advice ?  Thanks!

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm late to the party on this one, but I had a similar situation.

I got my core EM rotation in a small rural WA town, which was great as I got to touch every patient that walked in, develop a plan, get higher level imaging/labs, help with admits, etc.

 

Wanted another EM rotation as my elective, and got an UC attached to a FP clinic, onsite lab/xray etc. It really solidified my basics in EENT, Resp, suturing, I&D, and (this is important) when to ship 'em over to the ER.

It was one of my favorite rotations because, again, I saw (almost) every patient that walked through the door and hammered down my core fund of knowledge for treatment guidelines of the common issues (COPD exac, pneumonia, strep, ortho, sinusitis, AOM, etc)

In my month there we had 3 DVTs, Thyroid Storm, MI, and a septic pt). I'm sure there were more that we didn't catch :D

 

I think you'll enjoy it. You really get good at developing rapport quickly!

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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Funny counterpoint to that story:

 

My core Surgery rotation was at Hurley Medical in beautiful downtown Flint, MI, and it was completely awesome. PA-run trauma team and SICU, first-assist on all the cool stuff, very smart and also completely chill surgeon bosses. I took 24-hour call every Friday. I lived in a crappy dorm with no Internet, and literally had nothing to do but study surgery and do surgery. One Sunday night the football game sucked, so I wandered from the cafeteria to the ER and helped the PA who was working, just for fun. One night at 3am I finished scrubbing after the attending (like you do) and he was standing in the assistant spot. He pointed at the lead spot, for me. I got to revise the incision and go back into a dude with an abdominal abscess. Just a wash-out, but cool, right? 

 

By the end of 6 weeks, I was damn near ready to be a trauma surgery PA. They even offered me a fellowship to do just that after school (horrible money, but god the experience would have been amazing). Plans to start a family and having just gotten married made living in Flint for a year a non-starter, but still. I had the fire, I had the skills, I wanted to check it out some more.

 

So for my elective, I picked Trauma Surgery. They put me in a run-down overworked cruddy public hospital in South Chicago, which shall go nameless. The attendings wouldn't speak with students, and you weren't supposed to make eye contact. The residents were miserable. There were no PAs. We were told not to sign progress notes with "PA-S" after our names, and I'm fairly sure they were committing Medicare fraud by doing that.

 

I got to the OR a total of six or eight times in six weeks. The most sewing I got to do was on a decedant after the open thoracotomy didn't work. I saw the library and the call room a lot. LAME. Completely lame. And their trauma service was pretty weak.

 

So: the moral of the story is, the site is important, but it can be very tough to know anything about which choice is the good one until you're actually there. And you can learn a ton either way, even if it's a solid and specific sense of where you don't want to work in the future.

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  • 4 weeks later...

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