Week 4

During week 4, I had this opportunity to the Emergency Department of the NYP hospital. I was assigned to Area C of the ED, which takes care of most nursing cases among emergencies. After I arrived, Dr. Richard Lappin oriented me around the entire area including attending rooms, nursing stations, pharmacy and office area. The ED resident, Zack, helped me a lot when I was trying to figure out the entire nursing procedure after each patient entered the ED. Each patient would be sent to a nursing area or a bed first, fill in basic information, then wait for hours for just meeting the doctor or residents. After checking the patient's status, residents tend to generate some presumptions based on the symptoms shown, then they reported to their attending doctor, Dr. Lappin, and discuss with him for further examination and diagnosis. The seemingly ridiculously length wait time, from my experience, was understandable in the sense that it took each doctor/resident much time on caring each patient: from the physical test, routine imaging protocols (X-ray or CT), to report and discussion with the attending doctor, then finally documenting everything into the archive. It seemed to me that doctors spend lots of time on stuff other than seeing the patients. This was a great experience for me, as an insider of the Emergency Room, to begin to think about what is really happening outside the curtain of the attending room, an experience I hadn't had before either as a patient or a student.