Be patient with your doctor - he could be making his debut!

Hey everyone!

Here we are on the 20th Jan and we've reached the end of my week of orientation!!! Today was our ward orientation and we joined our respective teams. I met my aged care team and was introduced to a really nice outgoing intern, registrar and one of my 2 consultants - the bosses I'll be working under! My outgoing intern had his own RMO orientation to attend in the morning so he handed me his pager and hey presto - I was suddenly the intern for the morning!!! The feeling was somewhat exhilirating, whilst at the same time as if I was carrying a ticking time bomb! But actually, I soon realised after a couple of pages that nothing too demanding was being demanded of me (well at least thus far *fingers crossed*!) and with the help of my registrar (who assumed I knew absolutely nothing!) I managed to make it through the morning till my intern returned!

Now about to go out for our RMO association end of term/welcome new interns dinner at the Malaya restaurant at King St Wharf! While I'm out you can read this article Jimbo sent out! It's from today's online Sydney Morning Herald!

Be patient with your doctor - he could be making his debut

By Anonymous
January 20, 2006

HAVE an apple today. Whatever you do, don't get sick. Please.
Sound advice at the best of times, but particularly prudent right at this moment. Next week, there will be an influx of shiny new doctors into the NSW health system. I'll be one of them and you could be my very first patient. Like most of my fellow interns, I'm terrified.
More than 200 interns will start their first day of work on the wards on Monday. There are a few true geniuses out there who appeared to simply breeze through medical school and will surely excel from day one. But the majority are just praying, "Not on my shift, please, not on my shift."
It's an oft-quoted fact that "complications" increase in January, aided by the influx of nervous junior doctors who have yet to find out just how their new hospital works and where everything is. We've been through medical school and passed our exams, we've been floating around various hospitals for the past few years of our lives; but come Monday, we'll be unleashed on an unsuspecting public.
And it will all be new again. Despite our education and training, there is little preparation for the bowel-clenching sleep-menacing terror of new responsibility for an ill person's life and wellbeing.
No longer can we hide using the "I'm just a medical student and can't legally sign for anything" ploy. Now we're going to be responsible for dosing and choosing the morphine, the heart drugs, the anticoagulants, the antibiotics and all the 1001 other pills, capsules, injections, fluids, ointments, creams, suppositories and enemas than no human being can memorise.
Waiting for the phone call: "Mrs Nguyen's blood results have risen off the scale, Mr Ahmed's got chest pains, Miss Jones complains she's not feeling 100 per cent - what are you going to do about it, doctor?"
The perks of being called "doctor" will grow stale very quickly. It's not the glamorous verging-on-mythical portrayal of television and film. We're not ER-like walking encyclopedias, willing to risk careers to chase down wandering patients outside the hospital for radical treatment.
If anything, my peers advocate Scrubs as being the most realistic and representative hospital show: the absurdities, the sad and depressing hopeless cases, the terror and the unbalanced power interactions between patients, nurses, and the medical hierarchy.
You can spot us on the wards. Neatly dressed in appropriate hospital attire, stethoscope dangling, an armful of paperwork and a shiny-faced idealistic desire to help mixed with the sleep-deprived stare of a rabbit caught in the headlights. When you see us, please be patient and understanding - we want to do our best for you, but it may have to wait for countless reasons. "What are you going to do about it, doctor? Doctor?"