I finished up the first tier of patient care at the Campus Health Center yesterday. To be considered for an outside clinic position, you must pass the second tier of patient care at the CHC, but with a shortage of interns in the outside clinics, there are a handful of 9th term students being considered for outside clinic placement early.
To finish the first tier you need 50 patient visits on UWS students, 15 ACMAS's (this is where a clinician watches you treat your patient), a handful of academic credits and you need to pass a quality assessment (this is where a quality assurance person comes in and watches everything you do during a patient visit). I ended up with 61 visits to pass this first tier. The reason for this is I could not get my ACMAS's. In the CHC, the attending physicians are so swamped with things to do that they cannot come in to observe everyone treat their patients. So, I had to annoy my clinician right up to my very last visit this week to get checked off. In the end, I will likely get some sort of credit for the extra 11 visits but who knows what for.
Now that I am done with the first tier, I am a bit worried about the next phase. From my understanding, we must find our own patients. If we are off-sited, we will be responsible for building a practice. Granted, we need these skills for real life but we are also balancing academic work too. The system is flawed in my opinion. I look at OHSU, the medical school in Portland, on how they have a huge presence in the community as being the number one source to go to for the best medical care in Oregon. When you look at it from afar though, they are a school educating young doctors who have never done elaborate procedures on patients. They are rookies just like us. Do they have to find their own patients? No because the school is pulling a huge number of patients from the community due to their ability to pay top dollar for the best physicians.
UWS is quite different. We are supposed to be the number one evidence-based school in the States but the staff cannot get patients into the clinics. So their solution is to force the students to get their own patients and to make it even more cheery, they hold you back if you can't get your patient visits. How are you supposed to make plans for a preceptorship in the community you want to set up shop if you may not graduate in the time you hope to? This is the reality we face.
Could UWS be different? Absolutely. My impression of it all is that there is no creative energy in the approach to market the school as a the best place to obtain treatment for musculoskeletal and conservative/preventative health care. There is absolutely nothing being done. The massage school on campus is doing a better job of marketing their program's services than the chiropractic school is. This is what boggles my mind. We pay over $100,000 each for our education at UWS and we are constantly beaten down by the professors and the clinic requirements. It is a bit masochistic and quite unfair.
On a positive note, if there is one, moving forward is satisfying. There is a level of pride that comes with venturing forward in a program like this. My satisfaction comes from seeing results with the patients I work with. In the long run, there will always be a business side of any health program and it should not be all about the business of things that tend to deter ones path. Patient care should be the number one priority and when looking back, I think my decision to go to UWS was a good one despite the ongoing hurdles.
All for now
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