I just got a volunteer job in the Shock Trauma Unit on Mondays and General OR on Wednesdays and Thursdays at a major teaching hospital in Baltimore. This’ll be great clinical experience for when I apply to med schools. Does anyone who works in these areas have any advice they could give me? I’m really afraid that I’m going to say something wrong, do something wrong, or break some rule that I didn’t know about. What’s worse, I don’t want to do anything that’ll adversely affect a patient.
You’re not going to be allowed to hurt anyone! They’re never going to leave you alone with a patient long enough to harm them. You can avoid saying something wrong by not saying all that much until you get in the swing of things. Nobody expects you to know a whole lot of anything yet. Staff will be glad of the extra hands. Important rules will be made known to you. Listen and learn and ask questions and make little mistakes and ALWAYS own up to those. You’ll learn to be a real help.
Cyn, RN
Congratulations! I would not worry too much about saying the wrong thing. You’ll be trained extensively before you’re let loose on patients or families.
Believe it or not, they’re already prepared to cut me loose in the TRU/OR. I report to the charge nurse on Monday and she’ll show me the rounds. All of my orientation is complete. When I worked in the ED at Anne Arundel Medical Center, the only training I got was “You are not a doctor – remember that. Keep your arms tucked in at all times. If you pass an empty room with soiled linens, clean the room and change the linens. Restock the supply closets if they appear low. Now go fill ice bags.” My trainer then vanished. :dubious:
What the Employee Health nurse told me today that I found extremely surprising is that volunteers are sometimes asked to take vitals. :eek:
I’m also at UMMS, by the way. Do you still have my number? We’ll do lunch.
Adam
When you are in the OR, do not touch anything that is blue (sterile).
If you are not doing anything productive, follow around whatever doctors and medical students you can find, and let them know that you are planning on applying to medical school–at a teaching hospital, they should be happy to teach you whatever they can.
Be nice to the nurses and make their jobs easier, and they will make your experience much more pleasant and useful.
I do not. Email: gingerofthenorth at hotmail.com. I work my own hours (I don’t work for the hospital, I’m a vendor employee and as such my time is my own) so pretty much Wednesday is my only guaranteed lunchy-time attendance.
Red Cross personnel in Spain are all volunteers and they take pulse, pressure and temp… moms take temperature quite frequently, specially when the kids are small (there’s a couple years when if they’re not having a minor reaction to the latest vaccine they have an infection, or so it seems at times).
Just remember: if the thermometer gives a number in the 30s, it’s in Celsius
Very important advice there. Not washing hands in between patients is probably the one way that a volunteer actually could hurt patients.
Anyway, good lukc with this. Taking vitals is pretty straightforward, and it will be good practice for med school where you’ll constantly be in a position of having to learn new stuff on the fly.
But seriously: IANA medical professional, just someone who has volunteered in a few hospitals (including an ER, though it wasn’t a trauma center). I second much of what has already been posted, but my real advice is just to be patient with your own limitations.
While volunteering in the ER I grew frustrated with how much I couldn’t do: I had first aid and CPR training, and I was an adult (post-college), but I wasn’t allowed to so much as get a patient some water without asking a nurse first – though don’t get me wrong, I completely understood why. Volunteering in the Pediatric ER was a little better, because I felt like I was being more of a help when I was reassuring both kids and their grownups. Volunteering in the maternity ward was the least frustrating, because all of the patients were healthy (the NICU didn’t use volunteers) and I didn’t have to watch people in crisis while not being able to do anything about it.
Agent Foxtrot, where you there today around 6:00 p.m.? I brought in a trauma patient and thought of you.
Of course, I don’t know what you look like, and wasn’t about to go wandering around asking random people if they were ‘Agent Foxtrot.’
