My emergency medicine rotation was completed at Queens Hospital center. During this rotation I worked with new preceptors whenever I was on shift. Since this was my 8th rotation, all preceptors gave me full autonomy to see patients on my own, write up HPI, differential dx, and plan for the patient. The feedback I received from the preceptors I worked at was with that my differential dx, and plans were how they would treat the patient. One of the things I enjoyed about this rotation is the ED is PA-ran, and there are tons of opportunities to see patients and perform procedures. I was able to perform suturing, removal of suturing, casting, IV lines, drawing blood cultures, and placing EKGs. I also got to practice my EKG reading skills, and because of the systemic way of reading an EKG taught by Dr. Khan, I received feedback that I did a great job of reading EKGs. I also got to work across different teams such as fast-track, and the main. Fast-track was like my ambulatory care rotation, where I saw patients with URI like symptoms, back pain, and medicine refill, at times it was overwhelming because of number of patients that would get seen within one shift.
My biggest takeaway from this rotation was that given the autonomy I was given as a student is the importance of teamwork communicating with attendings about your plan, working with nurses to get medication, talking to consults about admission, as well as sign outs at the end of the shift was all new to me as I didn’t have exposure to that prior to this rotation. This is an area that I need to work on is working with multiple different health-care providers, and staying on top of it as things can get lost in communication.
