Facepalm

July 2, 2009 at 4:00 am | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Orientation is a necessary evil, I guess.  But really, how many times do I need a review of OSHA regulations and handwashing?  Or HIPAA?  Well, I’ll admit I haven’t had quite as many reviews of HIPAA.  But my training on its bastard cousin HIPPA has been so frequent that I now despair even about graduate and professional education here in the U.S.

So I entertained myself yesterday with a comparison of how different institutions emphasize different things in their orientations.   Where I was before, their main goal was to get everyone ready to work on Day 1.  So we got set up with pagers and chart access, scrubs and labcoats, door codes, dictation codes and cheat sheets, and lots of talks about what to expect on the service, professionalism, etc.

Here we did bloodborne pathogen training, basic network access but not chart access, nametags, insurance cards, work/life balance, ACGME competencies, the standard HIPAA {“HIPPA”} presentation, and had a discussion of appropriate prescribing practices.  But nothing in terms of getting what we need to do the actual work of a physician.  No chart access, no scrubs, no lab coat, no pager.

Fortunately I had some free time in the afternoon while everyone else was off getting oriented at a hospital where I won’t be rotating.  So I got all of that done.  But had that not been the case, I would have been woefully unprepared to work today.