Pushing Boundaries

Today I had my first interview with a volunteer patient for communication skills. I figure that I’m pretty personable and I had set questions to ask (more or less) so I thought it would be relatively straightforward. What I didn’t account for is the difference between having a social conversation with someone or one in which you have a minimal relationship (e.g. when I’m interviewing a job applicant) vs the role of the physician to uncover sometimes really sensitive, personal stuff that the patient doesn’t even want to talk about. I’m used to not really pushing if a person answers an open-ended question quite briefly & in a way that doesn’t really permit easy conversation flow. As a physician, no matter. I need to keep probing (in a very soft & gentle, exploratory way) even when someone seemingly desires to keep the conversation quite surfacey. Man, it’s tough. So needless to say, my interview was a good ‘learning opportunity’ for my classmates and I today (aka it kinda sucked after the initial pleasantries which I managed quite well). The interview was supposed to last 10 minutes and mine lasted only 5 min, 40 sec. Ugh! I started to bail when I couldn't figure out how to dig deeper. Oh well, we get to do 3 of them this semester so early on is a good time to struggle with it. Be prepared friends in case I choose you to do some patient interviewing role-playing with me. :) In other news, we’ve been assigned the family doctors that we’re going to be shadowing for 4 afternoons this semester. My shadowing starts next week! Sadly, the order for our stethoscopes won’t be in until all of my doctor’s office meetings are finished. But just to reassure you as members of the general public, don’t worry about 224 first year medical students being unleashed into the world of health care in week 4. All we’ll be doing in the offices will likely be watching the doctor-patient interactions, maybe occasionally getting to interview a patient ourselves, and maybe, just maybe, getting a chance to check blood pressure (which I learned this week). I’m pretty eager to see what it’s like ‘on the inside’ and to talk to the doctor about running her practice and how that works, like how she gets paid (per service but also per patient I think?), how long she spends with each patient, etc. It’ll be great to be able to get exposure at both the Centre (my volunteering) and the family doctor’s office to be able to compare the differences given that both physicians will be trained as family doctors. As for the frustrating “comments” experience some of you have had by trying to post them, I have removed any moderation by me because that feature obviously wasn’t working. It seems that your comments had been dutifully captured by blogger & then chucked into the abyss by them rather than emailed to me. No, I wasn't screening you out. So, once again, I encourage you to voice your ‘hellos’ via the comments button below. Be sure to scroll down on the comments screen and click on “Publish comment” or else it will be lost if you just type it and close the window. This time you’ll be able to immediately see if it worked because when you refresh your screen it should show up. Okay – that’s the last of the comment instructions or mentions from me. Hope you’re all having a good week!