How scribing has helped me in my 1st year

Hello Medhatters!

I’m pretty comfortable giving advice on scribing since I used to teach scribes. And I’m comfortable talking about my experiences in medical school. Although I will let you decide on how helpful they are.

What I would like to discuss today is how scribing has (or hasn’t) helped me in medical school (so far). I’m writing this on the last few days of my winter break before I dive head first into my second semester of my first year. So that definitely means it will be posted way later… It also means I have many more semesters to go to see how scribing has helped me. But we will stick to what has helped me so far.

In general, we hope that our pre-med experiences help us out in some way, shape, or form by the time we get to medical school. Or nursing school. Or PA school. We are hoping to not have to start from square one or get thrown into a situation head first without any context to draw from. Because let’s be real: as humans, we react to situations, especially new situations, by drawing off of previous experiences. So we hope as medical students that we have some context to help us out. Mostly because we have no idea what we are doing most of the time anyways. So a little bit of help is amazing!

I’m also hoping for this post to be much shorter than some of my other, very lengthy posts. I really like to talk, and surprisingly when I think I have nothing to write about, I still end up with a long post. So if you aren’t in the mood to read a lengthy post today, you are in luck!

How it as helped: Anything related to interacting like a future doctor 

In general, I would say my scribe experience has helped me the most in my PCM course (or Principals of Clinical Medicine/How to be a doctor course). Mostly because doing charting and seeing interactions between patients and physicians or physician-extenders was something that would occur multiple times a day, all day, for many years for me.

I’m comfortable here. I’ve seen how a physician asks questions, helps guide their patients along during their conversation, and they types of exams to choose for their complaints. I’ve even thankfully had some interaction with medical decision-making and ordering certain things for certain issues.  It’s very different being on the other side though, so that part does make me a bit nervous. But overall, I’m definitely a lot more chill than some of my other classmates when it comes to this part of our education.

Here are some more specific points for you:

• Knowing how to write notes. They don’t really give you a great grasp on how to do this in medical school. But they do teach you all of the necessary components of the chart and how to get information for those parts.
• You are more comfortable with being in a room with a patient
• You know and are comfortable with so.many.terms!
• You are comfortable with the outline of how to do an exam. You may not know how to do something specifically, but you are learning why you do it in medical school and how to actually do it. But from being as scribe, you’ve seen your physicians run through this like the back of their hand. You could probably give a run down of how to do one or a good order to perform one in before they actually teach you. (Doesn’t mean you are good at it though).
• You will utilize that same “on the fly” learning ability to quickly pick up things/research them. Remember when you had to do so much searching and figuring out on your own to get the information you needed? Same thing applies here. Use it. You can thank me later.
• This “on the fly” learning transfers to other courses; not just in your ‘how to be a doctor’ course.
• Trouble-shooting.  This one is interesting for me. I would do this all the time as a scribe and then try to figure out the best way to fix my problem before asking for help from the doctor. But turns out it works great here too when you are learning so many things.

What I’m expecting it to help with in the future:

• Mostly in my rotations. I expect to feel pretty at home in a variety of clinics. My last scribe job had me starting up clinics and I would work in several different clinics throughout the week. I’m hoping that having to be thrown in and learn my way around different clinics will help me feel more comfortable.
• Putting my ability to ask other staff for resources in my rotations. This one was hella helpful as a scribe. I fully intend to utilize every resource possible during my rotations.
• Charting on new EMRs. Well using an EMR in general.

And I will see how much more I can come up with in the years to come!

What it hasn’t helped with:

• I’m still a little nervous. Check out my “What Still Makes Me Nervous” post from last week to see more in-depth and specifics on this!
• It doesn’t mean I will pass on everything I do. Especially skills wise. I failed a few things my first semester. One of them being a competency for taking vital signs. To be fair, I wasn’t allowed to touch patients as a scribe… so handling patients is definitely a new skill I’m learning!
• Multitasking isn’t as helpful. What I mean by this is multitasking is needed and very helpful with scribing. But honestly, in medical school you are learning difficult concepts at lightening speed. So it’s actually easier to pull all your focus on that one concept than trying to spread yourself thin.

And that’s all I’ve been able to come up with! If you are thinking about scribing and want to know the benefits and pitfalls to your future in medicine, hopefully this helps. Also, check out my scribing section on my blog if you are interested in scribing. Lots of information on there.

As always, let me know what you liked, didn’t like, and what you would like to see next in the comments!