Anyone else feel confused as to role during 3rd year?

[golfman]

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I'm in my 3rd rotation, and this is the 1st time I don't really know what my role is in this particular rotation. My first rotation was lame and was basically shadowing. My 2nd rotation was awesome, I had a ton of autonomy and got to make all the calls, and then run them by the resident to make sure they were okay. The resident would of course confirm my physical exam findings and such, but they would use my daily progress notes and such.

Now, I'm on my 3rd rotation and I just don't know what my role is. It's kind of a mix of my first two experiences. I have my "own" patients to see, but an intern is assigned to them as well. The intern is the one that gets paged from different consults for patients (they want it this way), and I feel like I am constantly out of the loop because I'm not getting the updates. Then I feel like I'm just bugging the resident because they are constantly having to update me on things that are going on. And they don't really care about my daily progress notes and H and P's, because they do their own handwritten ones.

I guess I'm frustrated because I really want to do well on my rotations, but I feel like it's tough to do that when I'm out of the loop and have to constantly ask the residents what the consults said and they really don't care about my notes at all. Oh well, I just try to help out where I can and make their lives easier, but it seems the opposite usually occurs and they have to spend time updating me on stuff.

Just to say, I love my residents and I'm not at all complaining about them. I just feel like I'm really not a help to the team at all and I'm searching for ways to be useful. I'm trying to do a lot of outside reading to maybe contribute some kind of knowledge.

Anybody else sometimes get frustrated with your role, or lack thereof, in 3rd year?

 

[rem6775]

This is clearly the wrong place for this, but anyway...

Your job as a third year is to do scut work, take over-detailed histories and physicals and know everything about your patients. You shouldn't really have to ask your resident what a consult said. It's your job to stay on top of what is going on with your patient and know what's going on. Unless you're in some arcane system, why can't you look up the notes from these consults and follow-up yourself?

 

[golfman]

Fetch. Wrong freaking forum. Oh well. Just make this whole thread go away mods.