My fourth rotation was Family Medicine at South Shore Family Medical in Far Rockaway. This was my second outpatient rotation after Ambulatory Care and I felt more prepared and confident walking in for this rotation than I did with my Ambulatory Care. On our first day our preceptor walked us through the EMR system which I had never used before so this was new to me. It took me about 3 days to fully learn the EMR and become efficient with it. Due to the current pandemic situation, South Shore Family Medical was open only 3 days a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) and no patients with a fever or cough were allowed to come in. The majority of patients we saw during this rotation were mostly for employment physicals, annual exams, post-hospitalizations, and we also had a few patients that presented with more general symptoms such as abdominal pain, headaches, chest pains, back pain, and sciatica.

In this outpatient clinic there was only one provider (PA Chana Meltzer) and about 3-4 students every day. There were 3 rooms where we could go and see patients and usually each student would have 1 room during the whole day. For each patient we (students) would complete the HPI, performed physical exam, review their medications, and come up with a potential differential diagnosis and a plan to follow up with our assessments. Once all these tasks were completed we would then present our patient to PA Chana and she would come in with us and review everything and make sure everything was fine before sending the patient home.

One element I loved during this rotation was that we were exposed to a great number of patients per day. In a day like a Wednesday we would see a total of 45-50 patients which was honestly a great experience and I feel that I learned a lot and got more confident with approaching a patient and writing their HPI’s. Another element that I loved during this rotation was the opportunity to do venipunctures. I did at least 2-3 venipunctures per day during this rotation and by the end of this rotation I felt really good and confident in finding a vein and collecting blood. During the first 2 days, I was really nervous and shied away from most venipunctures and I tried to observe rather than do them myself. However, as times passed I slowly build up that confidence and was happy to finally do them on my patient rather than asking for help.

One memorable experience during this rotation was that we saw a patient who was on the verge for having a DKA. He was a new patient and came in complaining of polyuria and polydipsia that had been going on for a week. He also mentioned that his vision was becoming blurry but thought that was due to just playing videogames. Based on these symptoms alone we decided to check his blood glucose in the office and the machine literally read “too high-error”. PA Chana said that this was the first time she had seen that reading before and stated that the highest she has ever seen in that little machine was 600. Pt was sent to ER. This was a great learning experience and reminds you as a medical provider you have a lot of responsibility with these patients and their lives.

One challenge that I experienced during my Family medicine rotation was seeing two patients at the same time. Sometime a parent and a child or 2 siblings would come in together and both of them needed to be seen by a provider. During my first week I had an issue with the timing. I would take a while for me to finish up the notes for both patients while they were waiting and I could notice they would sometimes get bored and annoyed. This was also partially my fault as I would only concentrate on my notes and barely talked to them until my note was finished. One way I got around this issue was by being more talkative as I would write my note. For example, during HPI I would repeat everything they said and talk out-loud as I was typing notes down. Overall, this has been a great leaning experience and I’m excited to start my next rotation in OBGYN.

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