ER: Division Meeting

Every month, the ER physicians, charge nurses, and other staff members get together for about 4 hours to discuss everything that's going on within the department and how things can be improved. Other doctors I've worked with have hinted that the meeting can range from benign to turning into a huge blown-out argument, and for some reason, medical students are required to attend these things. So Kate, Adam, Garrett, Jeremy, and I went to the meeting not knowing what to expect.

The first two hours were a huge snoozefest. There were discussions with the nursing staff about new hires within the nursing and physician community (i.e. Harris hiring new neurosurgeons while trying to keep nurses from leaving), and more importantly, how to improve patient care. Several doctors (I think Dr. Trot was among them) wanted to do away with the hallway beds until all the medicine and fast track rooms were filled, since a patient has no privacy or confidentiality in a hall bed where people are passing through all the time. "Can't do a rectal exam on someone in the hall," said one. Then there was the issue of computer availability. Some wanted certain computers to be used only by physicians and not nurses or med students (understandable), and then there was the issue of overcrowding at the fast track station b/c doctors, med students, and scribes tend to congregate there and then create a mess. Sometime around 11 a.m. someone quipped that we were missing the inauguration, but no one even said a word about turning on the flat-screen TVs in the room to watch it. There was no point to the students even being there; we were only there b/c it was required by Dr. W and Dr. McC, who weren't even there the whole time b/c Dr. W was working! Adam got to leave early with Dr. K (who purposely schedules to work on the day of division meetings so he can leave earlier), but the rest of us passed the time by playing with our PDAs. At one point Garrett and I scribbed out our tentative rank lists to show them to each other, and since I had my 12 programs clustered into "tiers," he decided to rank some of my programs for me based on location alone. When I saw what he labeled as #12, I couldn't agree more.

One of the more amusing topics brought up was how the radiology system keeps a lot of the number of times an image is viewed. "If the x-ray of the patient with a fork shoved into his urethra is viewed 200,000 times, that's a HIPPA violation right there," said one. This, of course, made all the students' eyes pop open. A fork in the urethra?! Jeremy commented quietly that the other day he saw someone with an eggplant in his rectum (what on earth...). Towards the end of the meeting, however, the doctors each presented case studies. One of the doctors, who wasn't present, was on the verge of getting sued b/c he removed a foreign object from the foot of a diabetic who couldn't afford the antibiotics prescribed to him, and he ended up losing his leg. In hindsight, maybe he could have been given IV antibiotics, but it's a hard call. The doctors ended up closing the discussion b/c the doctor in question wasn't there to explain what had happened. The meeting closed on a more fun note, though, with Dr. W telling us other things that he has found in people's rectums like onions. "That was hard to remove, one slice at a time!" he said. *sigh* Why do people do stupid things in the name of pleasure?