Medical Rotation

Alhamdulillah, I have finished my medical rotation. After 5 weeks of spending time following a general medical team, there has been lots of stuff that I've learned yet at the same time, I managed to find out the limit of my knowledge. Clearly, after studying medicine for 6 years, there are still a lot that I don't know.

6 years of studying medicine does not really teach you how to works as a doctor. There seems to be a big gap on how to put all your medical knowledge into practise. Doctors do lots of paper works and referral. Medical school won't teach you how to fill in those paper works. You are supposed to observe it from the interns during this semester and learned it by yourself.

Referring patients to the other specialty is not an easy task to do. Interns are supposed to refer any suitable patients to the specialist for further management. The most difficult part of this process is to answer questions from specialist on reason for referral. I've seen how interns were scared to death when referring to the specialist. If you are not able to answer the questions from the specialist, the referral won't be accepted and you have to tell this to your own consultant.

Many patients who are admitted to the hospital require lots of medical imaging such as chest X-ray, CT scan and MRI. Radiology department is always busy and it is not easy to get a slot for your own patient. Somehow, the young doctor has to plead or find convoluted ways to get permission from the radiologist. Asking for permission to do medical imaging for your patient will always be one of the most difficult tasks for an intern.

Drug chart is one of the most common tasks that every young doctor will do. Yet up to now, I have never been taught formally about all of the doses of the medication. The university asks us to learn it by doing online course.

In the last 5 weeks, I have learned more on how to do my future job more efficiently than learning anything on medical knowledge. Hopefully, my next two rotations will be interesting :)