Don’t Get Sick in July?
07.01.08
If you happen to get sick this summer in Southern California and you wind up at my hospital, you can expect to find a gaggle of eager, intelligent, competent and caring new, young doctors (we like to call them ‘interns’) ready to listen intently to your story, as well as your heart and lungs of course. They may be ‘green’ but they certainly aren’t dangerous so long as they’re armed with 2 important tools: supervision & sleep.
The former seems blatantly lacking the story quoted below.
Every neophyte is owed the opportunity to be taught so long as the teacher recognizes her imperative to teach. Especially in a hospital in July.
According to medical lore, July is the worst time to be hospitalized because that’s when inexperienced med students start clinical training. But is summer really riskier for patients?
A month into Sandeep Jauhar’s medical internship at a prominent teaching hospital in New York City, he was asked to drain fluid from the belly of a patient who was HIV-positive. “I was trying to get out of the hospital to keep a dinner appointment,” he recalls. “I was sort of rushing. I heard a snap and there was all this fluid leaking all over the floor.” Jauher’s gloves were too small, he hadn’t assembled the tubes for the blood correctly, he was new, he was inexperienced and nobody was watching. “[The patient] was totally oblivious to the disaster, but it was a mess,” he says. “These are the mistakes that new, green interns can make.”
According to conventional wisdom, a patient’s chances of encountering a mistake-prone rookie like Jauhar go way up in the summer. That’s because July 1 is the start of the academic year for medical schools: In teaching hospitals around the country, medical students will replace interns, interns will replace residents and residents will move on to fellowships or to become full doctors.
This crucial and sometimes perilous training period can be incredibly difficult for medical students. As Jauhar writes in his recent book, “Intern, A Doctor’s Initiation,” incoming doctors are not only practicing on patients for the first time, they’re also learning the often Byzantine workings of their respective hospitals, new technical language, new procedures and the tedious, yet critical, ways to fill out paperwork. All this learning is packed into 80-hour workweeks and overnight shifts in a busy hospital environment—a far cry from the academic environment they might be coming from. But is it really riskier to go into a teaching hospital during those first few weeks of intern training? Or is the “July phenomenon” a medical myth?
Finish reading at New Docs on the Block
~casey
