A Patient Is Not A Number
When PA students are exposed to the clinical environment, dilemmas are sure to arise, namely between how we imagine we'll practice as PAs and the reality of the clinical atmosphere.
In the clinic, you are bound to encounter patients who provide information that is excessive or totally unrelated. But a working medical office operates under time constraints, so we have to take charge of the situation without being rude.
How do we treat the volume of patients who filter through an office in one day without viewing them as numbers? Medicine is a business. The temptation to get patients in and out becomes quite attractive.
If the waiting room seems like a packed holding tank and the exam room is a revolving door, the propensity to control patients rather than gently redirect them is evident. Too often, the patient becomes an ICD-9 code rather than an individual. As students, we often wonder how we can see patients rapidly without, frankly, being a jerk. These are clinical skills that develop over time but can easily be countered by the "rushed" mentality.
Something I try to do now in my clinical encounters is view each patient as someone close to me. Would I be rude to my grandma or cut off my best friend? There is obviously a way to kindly redirect the talkative patient.
Cordial exam room skills take practice and keen observation. We are not predisposed to be like our preceptors, right?