Work in Progress: Visual Aid Project
Practicing at an academic ED, such as in San Francisco General, I find that I am constantly surrounded by medical students, interns, and residents. Most are working on shift with me, but occasionally I have medical students shadowing me to learn more about the Emergency Medicine specialty. Have you ever had a person shadow you (excluding your annoying little brother when you were a kid)? It’s actually a little stressful for me, because I want the shift to be a positive learning experience for them. Inevitably, it doesn’t take long before I get immersed in mundane troubleshooting activities (eg. calling [...]
Article review: Standardizing the EM clerkship patient encounter experience
As a medical student, do you remember your EM clerkship experience and whether you saw a wide variety of patient chief complaints? Did your fellow medical student on the EM clerkship rotation, who was going into Orthopedics, seem to only see patients with orthopedic complaints? […]
Hot off the press: Two journals join Medline
If a journal gets accepted it into the Medline database, it is viewed with significantly more legitimacy. It follows then that your academic CV is better regarded if your publications appear in journals which are listed on Medline. Plus, it’s just fun to see your name listed in Pubmed when you search yourself! Hmm, that sounded more egotistical than I intended, especially since I don’t have that many publications on Medline… […]
Article review: Teaching when time is limited
A 2008 British Medical Journal article focused on practical tips and approaches to teaching in busy environments. This is especially relevant to those of us in Emergency Medicine. We are balancing trying to take care of patients, teach eager learners, and troubleshoot logistical hurdles while trying to find 30 seconds to eat dinner or have a bathroom break! I wonder how many emergency physicians have hydronephrosis at any given time on a shift… Someone should do a study. […]
Humorous distillation of specialty personalities
If only I had this flowchart when I was a first-year medical student! I too have always felt that emergency physicians have a little baseline crazy in them to be happy and successful in the specialty. This diagram has been floating around the web for years now, and I wanted to share with you. It’s a humorous (partly because there’s some truth to it) decision tree on how to choose your medical specialty. Did you decide upon the right field? […]
Article review: Interruptions during oral case presentations
Do you remember when you were a medical student and had to present patient cases to the ED attending? How often did they interrupt your presentation, and did this affect your learning experience? These were the questions that the following article by Dr. Rachel Chin (a super-mom colleague of mine at SF General) and Dr. Glen Yang answered in her 2007 publication in the Academic Emergency Medicine journal. Pubmed citation […]
Article review: Time management tips
I wish I had more time in the day. I was just browsing through the February 2009 Academic EM journal and came upon a commentary “Tuesdays to write… A guide to time management in academic emergency medicine” by Dr. Steven Lowenstein (Univ of Colorado at Denver). In the article, he outlines six time management tips to all of us trying to balance the pressures of our life with clinical care, research, teaching, and administrative duties, amidst an avalanche of hourly emails. I hate to admit it, but I am guilty of falling into most of the traps that he mentions. [...]