Objectives
1. Familiarize yourself with the layout of:
A. A typical ward nursing station
B. The Emergency Department
C. The OR Entrance
2. Familiarize yourself with the layout of a patient chart.
For the purpose of covering the learning objectives, you're a newly minted CC3 starting on General Surgery and are feeling somewhat disoriented. To help with this, first we'll cover some generally applicable information regarding your patients and then a brief virtual tour of the surgical ward, the emergency department, and the important areas outside the OR that you should become familiar with.
"Your" patients can come from 1 of 3 sources:
Assigned to you each morning by a your team lead eg. resident, attending, handover from another medical student, etc.
In the surgery rotation for example, these are patients recovering post-op. Often there will be a Powerchart list of all the patients admitted under your specialty that you want access to. You'll have to be given access to this list by someone who already has it: prev. CC3, resident, etc.
Given to you by an attending, usually something along the lines of: "Round on all my patients everyday." Whatever that means... You'll often not know all these patients, but it might be worth getting somewhat familiar with them for the sake of overnight call.
Patients for whom you assisted on their surgery and/or consult.
Either way, you will have a list of patients you are responsible for "rounding" on/seeing each day.
You happen to be on call today. You call Switchboard, find out which attending is also on call and text them to check in...