Preceptorship

As part of my medical school education I get to work along real live doctors during my first year. They call this a "preceptorship". I was assigned to work with a pediatrician in a clinic a couple miles from downtown. What this preceptorship entails is that once every other week during the Spring I go to the clinic for the afternoon and see patients and write up what they are there to see the doctor for. I ask the basic questions like "where does it hurt?" and "how long have you noticed it?". I also do basic physical examination stuff like listening to the lungs and heart, taking blood pressure, and checking eyes, ears and mouth.

What's a little unique about my preceptorship is that it's in a clinic where 90% of the patients are hispanic. This means that a lot of the parents bringing their children in to see the doctor speak only a little English and not very well. This is great because I speak only a little Spanish and not very well. Time to start brushing up on the espanol! Because I served my mission in Brazil, I have a lot of experience speaking Portuguese, which is closely related to Spanish. I also took 3 years of Spanish during high school, though most of it went in one ear and out the other. So now I have a real opportunity to build up my conversational Spanish skills. As extra practice, I signed up for a medical spanish elective at school that meets once for week for about 6 weeks. I need to get my Spanish going real fast though, because until I'm fairly fluent I won't be much use to the doctor.

In fact in my first two visits I mostly followed the doctor around. I can understand a good 90% of what people say, but speaking back is harder. I do see whatever English-speaking patients he has on my own (one so far) and that was a cool experience to do actual doctorly things with real people. So far it's been a lot of check-ups, runny noses, coughing and vomiting (not in the clinic on that last one, thankfully).

The doctor I'm working with is very experienced, in fact, he's set to retire this Summer. He did a summer internship at Primary Children's way back when he was in med school, so he already knew quite a bit about Utah even though he went to school in Arizona.

Hopefully in the coming weeks I'll be able to talk about more about this experience as it develops.