Did you find clinical rotations during didactic year helpful?

[Swarley]

Some schools require students to participate at a clinical site during didactic year. I copied this from a school that does to help clarify what I mean. "From the onset of the program, we have had our didactic students perform clinical rotations on a weekly basis. This process permits our students to have reinforcement of their lecture material and allows them to gain valuable experience in the clinical arena."

I know there are some schools that have this requirement. Was this aspect of your program helpful? Was there no impact? Is it essentially shadowing a PA?

[Swarley]

Some schools require students to participate at a clinical site during didactic year. I copied this from a school that does to help clarify what I mean. "From the onset of the program, we have had our didactic students perform clinical rotations on a weekly basis. This process permits our students to have reinforcement of their lecture material and allows them to gain valuable experience in the clinical arena."

I know there are some schools that have this requirement. Was this aspect of your program helpful? Was there no impact? Is it essentially shadowing a PA?

[Swarley]

Some schools require students to participate at a clinical site during didactic year. I copied this from a school that does to help clarify what I mean. "From the onset of the program, we have had our didactic students perform clinical rotations on a weekly basis. This process permits our students to have reinforcement of their lecture material and allows them to gain valuable experience in the clinical arena."

I know there are some schools that have this requirement. Was this aspect of your program helpful? Was there no impact? Is it essentially shadowing a PA?

[HappyDay]

This is actually helpful. For my program, it was just Histories and Physicals. It helped a student PA get comfortable with a patient encounter. Many of these rotations were NOT shadowing a PA. They were assessing a patient, deciding on an assessment and plan, and presenting to a preceptor. This is great experience for the clinical year. However, it does decrease available study time for didactic exams.

[HappyDay]

This is actually helpful. For my program, it was just Histories and Physicals. It helped a student PA get comfortable with a patient encounter. Many of these rotations were NOT shadowing a PA. They were assessing a patient, deciding on an assessment and plan, and presenting to a preceptor. This is great experience for the clinical year. However, it does decrease available study time for didactic exams.

[HappyDay]

This is actually helpful. For my program, it was just Histories and Physicals. It helped a student PA get comfortable with a patient encounter. Many of these rotations were NOT shadowing a PA. They were assessing a patient, deciding on an assessment and plan, and presenting to a preceptor. This is great experience for the clinical year. However, it does decrease available study time for didactic exams.

[Just Steve]

Depends on your personal background. My program would teach the physical exam and then that week we would visit residents of the local retirement village to practice with the elderly. Great community outreach and Nania appreciated the visit. Most of my class are paramedics, corpsman/medics, nurses...all of us have over 4000 hours of HCE, the average is around 12,000 hours. So the benefit of the exercise wasnt from the educational aspect but rather an easy class day and social time.

 

But if you haven't done many assessments, it's a nice warm up.

[Just Steve]

Depends on your personal background. My program would teach the physical exam and then that week we would visit residents of the local retirement village to practice with the elderly. Great community outreach and Nania appreciated the visit. Most of my class are paramedics, corpsman/medics, nurses...all of us have over 4000 hours of HCE, the average is around 12,000 hours. So the benefit of the exercise wasnt from the educational aspect but rather an easy class day and social time.

 

But if you haven't done many assessments, it's a nice warm up.

[Just Steve]

Depends on your personal background. My program would teach the physical exam and then that week we would visit residents of the local retirement village to practice with the elderly. Great community outreach and Nania appreciated the visit. Most of my class are paramedics, corpsman/medics, nurses...all of us have over 4000 hours of HCE, the average is around 12,000 hours. So the benefit of the exercise wasnt from the educational aspect but rather an easy class day and social time.

 

But if you haven't done many assessments, it's a nice warm up.

[UGoLong]

My program introduced patient care a bit in the didactic year. The most beneficial part of that was working in a local ER. We would see patients after they had been triaged, assess them, and develop a treatment plan that we would take to the attending. Sometimes you were right and sometimes you were wrong. It was one of the most motivating parts of the didactic year, convincing us that, yes, somehow we could pull together all the random factoids we were being taught!

[UGoLong]

My program introduced patient care a bit in the didactic year. The most beneficial part of that was working in a local ER. We would see patients after they had been triaged, assess them, and develop a treatment plan that we would take to the attending. Sometimes you were right and sometimes you were wrong. It was one of the most motivating parts of the didactic year, convincing us that, yes, somehow we could pull together all the random factoids we were being taught!

[UGoLong]

My program introduced patient care a bit in the didactic year. The most beneficial part of that was working in a local ER. We would see patients after they had been triaged, assess them, and develop a treatment plan that we would take to the attending. Sometimes you were right and sometimes you were wrong. It was one of the most motivating parts of the didactic year, convincing us that, yes, somehow we could pull together all the random factoids we were being taught!

[coolbreeze]

We are currently doing our site visits. Its mostly write-ups but depending on the site can be very hands-on. Some of my classmates got to hear murmurs on the sites and now they will remember that forever. From what I have been through so far, the preceptor knows you're a first year student and still getting a hang of things. You go in, see the patient and present your plan to the preceptor. Its ok to be wrong! Those are the things that you'll never forget!! It does take up a lot of time (3-4 hrs) on your site visit day. But over all good experience, better to get the butterflies out now than on your rotations :)

[sartort]

I chose a program that includes clinical hours along with didactic year intentionally. I haven't started yet to tell you how helpful it is, but I believe it will be very beneficial for me. It's not supposed to be like shadowing. We are going to get real experience to help us learn how to be clinicians. We will perform a physical exam and then watch the doc/PA perform one and compare/ask questions from my understanding. I have lots of direct patient care experience from before undergrad, but it's been a while. After three years of mostly classroom activities and only some volunteer healthcare experience that was mostly not direct-patient care I feel rusty with patient encounters and would like to feel confident enough with the patients during my first clinical rotation to get the most out of my experience. I think the clinical hours the first year will help with that.

[EMEDPA]

we did this at hahnemann/drexel. we had required "observation" shifts in the er during the didactic em course, etc which were very helpful.

[balsam88]

my program has site visits where we get to do a history and physical exam only on a patient which I think helps alot before actual rotations to get comfortable with this process with real patients

[EMEDPA]

during the hx and physical exam courses we had to go up on the floors and perform them on actual pts.

[jen0508]

we did a full h & p at the hospital and out patient offices about once a month during didactic, each time we would switch specialties. it was helpful really just to get used to the flow of the H & P and it helped me memorize the ENTIRE H &P and physical exam, but not really helpful for anything beyond that bc at that time everything i learned was just a random jumble in my head. It was helpful but i wouldnt say it is necessary. If you look at a group of PAs fresh out of school, you would not be able to tell the difference between someone who did H & P's during didactic and who didnt. prior experience and the quality of clinical year is what makes the most difference. i would say the difference between a student who did didactic clinicals and who didnt would deminish by the 2nd week of clincal rotations.

[katethegreat1]

We don't have clinical rotations during our didactic year, but we have the opportunity to volunteer at student-run clinics. I find this incredibly helpful. It not only reinforces my didactic learning, but it helps to keep my social skills up. (Has anyone noticed they became a social idiot during their didactic year?) I only wish I had even more time to volunteer.