AMCAS - what is appropriate to bring up when talking about patient contact?

[cornellius14]

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I'm writing about my family practice volunteering experience on my AMCAS app and wanted to get any advice on what is appropriate to bring up and what wouldn't be. The head physician there let me have a lot of patient contact, which I do want to express on my app. However, I do want to be respectful and not ring any red alarms. Is it appropriate to talk about giving non-invasive treatments to patients (e.g. the doctor would tell me go give a patient an albuterol nebulizer) or stuff like discharging patients from IV's? To me, it didn't seem like a big deal at all but I don't want to potentially offend any physicians who might not approve of volunteers having patient contact. If anyone has any experience with this I'd really appreciate it

 

[medicineisforme]

I don't think that there is anything inherently wrong with doing those and saying that you have - it'd be another thing though if we were talking about putting in an IV, but I assume we are not.
That's just my two cents

 

[FlowLimited]

I wouldn't include anything that indicates that you, an untrained volunteer, provided medical treatments to a patient. That's a slippery slope.

 

[random14]

Taking vital signs with instruction and supervision was fine in my application (n=1), but I wouldn't go beyond that.

 

[cornellius14]

And I would dsagree. Even a non-invasive treatment requires training for a provider not should a volunteer or shadower be doing so. Additionally there is no benefit to an adcom in describing the specific medical actuon that you may have participated in. They do not say anything about your characteristics, attributes, or what you “learned” about the profession, about doctor-patient interaction, etc. I dont care how much patient contact you had, I care what you got from it, what it shows about you, and how those attribute add to you being a med student and physician

This helped a ton, thank you so much I appreciate it!