Source: The New work times
There are few group projects in medical school — which is strange when you consider that there are few solo practitioners in the real world.
During medical school,
I spent countless evenings in a library, half-asleep, poring over
textbooks and talking through cases with other medical students. What I
did not do, ever, was take a class with anyone studying to be a nurse,
physician assistant, pharmacist or social worker. Nor did I collaborate
with any of these health professionals to complete a project,
participate in a simulation or design a treatment plan. It wasn’t until
residency that I first began to understand just how many professions
come together to take care of a single patient — what exactly they do,
how they do it, and how what I do makes their jobs easier or harder.
As a first-year
resident, you finally learn to put into practice the theory of medicine
you have been nurturing since fumbling around with organic chemistry
models in college. You learn in a safe and hierarchical environment —
with senior residents, fellows, consultants and attending physicians
each demonstrating, with increasing degrees of nuance and
sophistication, how much clinical medicine you have yet to learn and how
far you have left to go.
But, in all that time,
there is surprisingly little education on what it means to be a leader
of a medical team, with its nurses, physician assistants, pharmacists,
respiratory therapists, physical therapists, dieticians and case
managers. There is even less discussion of how to understand one
another’s roles, perspectives, frustrations and limitations.
