Feedback Friday in Family Medicine
- Hesham Hassan, M.Sc.
- Aug 26, 2017
- 3 min read
So, yesterday marked five weeks of my family medicine rotation. This week specifically was my week with inpatient service which has been an awesome experience. Inpatient service is when you are in the hospital instead of the traditional outpatient clinic setting of a primary care doctor. The experience that I have had with this in-patient week has been enlightening, and I am considering pursuing applying to Family Medicine for residency along with OBGYN. OBGYN would have the field of focus that I think I want as a future physician, but Family Medicine would offer diversity with the ability to still do some OBGYN-related work.
The attending physician for inpatient service does something I think is really awesome for the residents and medical students that come through the program. He does something called “Feedback Friday” where he sits with you one on one, praises you on your strengths and helps you identify your weaknesses. He also allowed me to ask questions freely at the end, that I used to help me gain a sense of what additional things I should do to improve my application for residency for the 2019 match. I figure there’s no time like the present to get started…
One thing I learned this week is how far I have to go. Although I have good clinical intuition and the ability to work with a wide-variety of people types, one thing I need to work on is my foundation of knowledge. I might never know enough to feel confident in everything, but at least I love learning medicine. I feel like I have so many different bits of knowledge and facts pertaining to different symptoms. My goal currently is to continue reading different articles pertaining to the diseases and syndromes I see patients afflicted with to help me string these facts together to help paint a more complete picture.
I also learned to be more comfortable seeking feedback with the expectation that attendings and residents generally want to provide feedback, and it is useful. I walk into every situation looking for something to learn, and one resident taught me to go re-learn a topic again even if you think you know it. I found this unique advice to be useful because just when you think you know a topic you can truly master it if you make yourself review it a few more times. Practice makes perfect, and this definitely applies to medical foundational knowledge. Although I know many things about medicine, I still have times where my confidence waivers and I feel that it is palpable to others in the room. By gaining feedback, I have a better sense of the perception others have of my performance and how it is not always concordant with what I feel internally. Introspection is definitely important to find areas of opportunity but I guess I have to remember sometimes that we are our own worst critics, and generally you do not perform as badly as you imagine.
Working with the residents also gave me a better sense of what to expect during residency when it comes to balancing family life with work life. I am not going to lie: I have reservations about how much I will miss out on family time when residency comes. Medical school can be demanding, but it seems to me that residency is a very different beast with 30 hour work days and a team relying on your performance in order to succeed. Taking time off in medicine is difficult, but near impossible in residency without placing the burden on someone else. I don't want to be that guy who burdens my team. One way I balance out family time currently with my responsibilities of medical school has been to make the little time I do get to spend with my wife or the kids count. It's not about the quantity of time that we have, but more about the quality. I do my best to connect with my kids through meaningful moments, and my wife and I are upfront about our needs or wants.
Next Friday, I will sit for my Family Medicine shelf exam. The week of Labor Day, I will be moving on to the next rotation: pediatrics. The end of Pediatrics will mark the halfway point for my third year, which is so exciting. It feels like yesterday I was leaving the island while at the same time the island adventure of the basic science years already feels like a lifetime ago.
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