Thursday, April 9, 2015

Clinic day

Post-dated from April 8.

Holy moly. What a day. We had our first clinic today after morning rounds. Someone estimated the clinic typically sees 300-500 patients on a clinic day, but today was the first clinic day after they had been closed for 1 week, and it was a market day, which also boosts the number of visitors. And on top of this, our attending physician was too sick to work. That's right, 5 med students, 4 doctors, and hundreds of patients. It wasn't a clinic. It was an onslaught. Basically picture the Helm's Deep scene from LOTR only instead of orcs they were all friendly people with infectious diseases.
Here's how we did it: we didn't, exactly. We couldn't... But we tried. Every time we thought we were making some headway on our stack of charts for patients waiting to be seen, another stack would appear, or we would peek outside to find absolutely no change in the massive hoard of people waiting to be seen. We saw as many patients as we could until dark, then told the still-gigantic throng to return tomorrow if they hadn't been seen. I felt bad. We admitted a lot of people, and there were still more who likely needed admission. We had enough time after clinic to head back to the house, eat dinner, and check on Dr. C (who says he has turned the corner, for those concerned) before turning back around for evening rounds at the hospital. But don't feel bad for us: Dr. Victoria still has to take overnight call in an overflowing OB ward, and operate tomorrow on patients we scheduled for surgery. I can't even imagine how she does it.

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