Class of 2022...how you doin'?

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vetmedhead said:
Tell me more about this
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We are on call for our ICU, ER, and isolation room while on specific small animal services (internal medicine, cardio, onco, derm, dent, neuro, ophtho, shelter med, primary care). There are two shifts per day: 6 pm to 1:30 am and 1 am to 8 am. For ER/ICU, you can be called in for basically anything clinically relevant/helpful/pertinent or if they get overwhelmed and can't get everything done. For isolation room, the internal medicine student with the isolated patient is "supposed" to contact you the day before to round you on that patient and you show up for that specific shift to watch it on a camera and do hourly (or however often) treatments.

At the same time some of those services have their own on call (cardio, onco, dent, neuro) that you also have to schedule around and distribute fairly across your rotation mates. So while I was on cardio, I was on call for cardio saturday day, then had a parvo puppy isolation shift Monday morning (Sunday night) from 1 am to 8 am, then went to cardio from 8 am to 4 pm. Then I was on call again for cardio Tuesday night. Granted, the cardio, onco, and dentistry services do not commonly call in students. Internal medicine should absolutely not have these on call shifts; our diagnostics rotation should cover those instead.
 
batsenecal said:
We are on call for our ICU, ER, and isolation room while on specific small animal services (internal medicine, cardio, onco, derm, dent, neuro, ophtho, shelter med, primary care). There are two shifts per day: 6 pm to 1:30 am and 1 am to 8 am. For ER/ICU, you can be called in for basically anything clinically relevant/helpful/pertinent or if they get overwhelmed and can't get everything done. For isolation room, the internal medicine student with the isolated patient is "supposed" to contact you the day before to round you on that patient and you show up for that specific shift to watch it on a camera and do hourly (or however often) treatments.

At the same time some of those services have their own on call (cardio, onco, dent, neuro) that you also have to schedule around and distribute fairly across your rotation mates. So while I was on cardio, I was on call for cardio saturday day, then had a parvo puppy isolation shift Monday morning (Sunday night) from 1 am to 8 am, then went to cardio from 8 am to 4 pm. Then I was on call again for cardio Tuesday night. Granted, the cardio, onco, and dentistry services do not commonly call in students. Internal medicine should absolutely not have these on call shifts; our diagnostics rotation should cover those instead.
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I guess I'm just confused, do you not have ER rotations? I don't understand why you need to be on call for ER things if there are already people staffing the ER service presumably with students on that service as well.

Honestly all of this shift arrangement sounds confusing and like they are just bridging staffing gaps with students lol

All of our on call is specific to the service we're on and we only have to go in after hours if something is happening to it, so basically if it goes to surgery and you're either on the primary surgery service or you are on anesthesia.

We're for the most part not allowed to go into the isolation wards or treat those patients directly. We do have a CCU rotation where we do a lot of the treatments for the critical care patients, but they split night and day shifts so we are spending at least some time with doctors to discuss treatment plans moving forward for those patients, rather than spending all of our time basically giving medication once an hour.
 
vetmedhead said:
I guess I'm just confused, do you not have ER rotations? I don't understand why you need to be on call for ER things if there are already people staffing the ER service presumably with students on that service as well
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We actually normally have 2 mandatory ER rotations, one small animal and then one of your choice (small animal, equine, or FARMS). This year, we just have the one small animal rotation. The shifts are split 7 a to 1 p, 1 p to 7 p, and 7 p to 1 p. The 10-15 students on ER are split across those, and everyone has one day off a week. So we have 3-5 students on ER at any one time. If ER gets overwhelmed with a ton of patients at once, you'll get called in.
vetmedhead said:
All of our on call is specific to the service we're on and we only have to go in after hours if something is happening to it, so basically if it goes to surgery and you're either on the primary surgery service or you are on anesthesia.
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The only services I can think of that do not have on call are internal med, primary care, derm, and diagnostics. Everyone else has on call that gets utilized. Certain services have a low to very low chance of calling you in (ophtho, dentistry, cardio, onco), but it does get utilized. If the resident is physically entering the building, you'll be called in too. Other services get called in far more frequently (neuro, particularly when they are on spinal myelopathies).
vetmedhead said:
We're for the most part not allowed to go into the isolation wards or treat those patients directly. We do have a CCU rotation where we do a lot of the treatments for the critical care patients, but they split night and day shifts so we are spending at least some time with doctors to discuss treatment plans moving forward for those patients, rather than spending all of our time basically giving medication once an hour.
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We are 100% responsible for all isolation treatments all day and all night.

We just started our critical care rotation this year. I start it the 15th! But I don't think there is a ton of direct patient care for that one. There are normally only 1-2 students on, so getting through all the hourly treatments for the 25ish patients in ICU wouldn't work. I think our CC students are assigned a few patients to manage and all ICU patients have their treatments done by the ICU nurses, regardless of what service they're on.
vetmedhead said:
Honestly all of this shift arrangement sounds confusing and like they are just bridging staffing gaps with students lol
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It is confusing your first block. After that, its very managable to at least schedule around. It does mean that if you take our small animal directed electives on main campus, we're on call every 3 days for *something*. It used to be every other day, but the Great Revolt of 2020 got it changed so that the on call was reduced.

If you take your directed electives and free electives off campus though, your on call will be less cause you'll only take one or two of those small animal services.

As far as staffing issues, you may or may not be on to something there lol
 
finnickthedog said:
This sounds awful.


And so does this.
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You would be right. I've some how slipped under the radar and have only been called in 2x for service on call (anesthesia in August that ended up not going to surgery and the septic abdomen on Tuesday) and one isolation shift (which was a royal PITA due to the student not the patient)

Thankfully, as of this morning I now only have on call for 4 weeks of equine for the rest of the year!!!!! My last iso on call was the day after Christmas and last ER/ICU was before that.
SkiOtter said:
What I thought 2020 def had a CC rotation
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I'm pretty sure we're the first? Now I don't know. Lol
 
batsenecal said:
We actually normally have 2 mandatory ER rotations, one small animal and then one of your choice (small animal, equine, or FARMS). This year, we just have the one small animal rotation. The shifts are split 7 a to 1 p, 1 p to 7 p, and 7 p to 1 p. The 10-15 students on ER are split across those, and everyone has one day off a week. So we have 3-5 students on ER at any one time. If ER gets overwhelmed with a ton of patients at once, you'll get called in.

The only services I can think of that do not have on call are internal med, primary care, derm, and diagnostics. Everyone else has on call that gets utilized. Certain services have a low to very low chance of calling you in (ophtho, dentistry, cardio, onco), but it does get utilized. If the resident is physically entering the building, you'll be called in too. Other services get called in far more frequently (neuro, particularly when they are on spinal myelopathies).

We are 100% responsible for all isolation treatments all day and all night.

We just started our critical care rotation this year. I start it the 15th! But I don't think there is a ton of direct patient care for that one. There are normally only 1-2 students on, so getting through all the hourly treatments for the 25ish patients in ICU wouldn't work. I think our CC students are assigned a few patients to manage and all ICU patients have their treatments done by the ICU nurses, regardless of what service they're on.

It is confusing your first block. After that, its very managable to at least schedule around. It does mean that if you take our small animal directed electives on main campus, we're on call every 3 days for *something*. It used to be every other day, but the Great Revolt of 2020 got it changed so that the on call was reduced.

If you take your directed electives and free electives off campus though, your on call will be less cause you'll only take one or two of those small animal services.

As far as staffing issues, you may or may not be on to something there lol
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Our CCU rotation is similar in that we generally pick a patient or two as our primary focus, with nursing staff doing the rest - however we did pop in and out of treatments for other things as needed or if it was interesting. For example I signed up to do the scheduled chest tube maintenance on a patient that wasn't mine because I had never had a patient with chest tubes before and the nursing staff found it a little tedious, so were happy to show me how to do it and then let me take over.
Day CCU was stressful af though, you were assigned an inpatient whose primary service was critical care (bit confusing but for example things like septic patients, toxin ingestions, rattlesnake bites - basically where they didn't necessarily need to be transferred to another service but still needed CCU stays) and then had to get up to date on their super long histories, round on it after having like 20 minutes to review the whole record, use the next 20 minutes after rounds to write treatment orders for the day, SOAP them, order labs, interpret labs, fail at answering all of the resident's questions, etc. On top of this you are supposed to at least be doing treatments on your patient if not also helping with treatments on others. No chance to sit down and you had to have everything done by the end of your shift or you couldn't leave, so you often ended up staying there until like an hour later.

That on call schedule sounds killer. Also, I think between the occasional to rare cases of lepto, the plague, and tularemia our school probably has a good reason to not have us running treatments in the iso wards lol. I think students used to do it for at least some shifts a very long time ago but the kibosh probably got put on that either from exposure risk or from the fact that we are more likely to accidentally do something wrong and track stuff through the hospital since we're learning. I have had classmates who went into iso because their primary patient was in there (e.g. parvo patient) but always accompanied by a doctor or nurse, depending on what needed doing
 
batsenecal said:
You would be right. I've some how slipped under the radar and have only been called in 2x for service on call (anesthesia in August that ended up not going to surgery and the septic abdomen on Tuesday) and one isolation shift (which was a royal PITA due to the student not the patient)

Thankfully, as of this morning I now only have on call for 4 weeks of equine for the rest of the year!!!!! My last iso on call was the day after Christmas and last ER/ICU was before that.
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I hate being on call so much, I'm really not sure how I'd fare with so much of it. I think I had somewhere around 10 on call shifts total (though 3 of them were ER and ER for some reason basically never calls you in so those barely count) and got called in 4 times, with one of those times being a double deal.

Would have ended up with a few more shifts in a normal year, but with the in person time cut in half on some of those rotations, I only had half as many on call shifts as I'd normally have expected for those.

I really am not a person who ever wants to be on call again. I'm just on edge the whole time, have trouble sleeping or doing anything and just end up being non-productive and jumping every time my phone makes noise.
 
finnickthedog said:
I hate being on call so much, I'm really not sure how I'd fare with so much of it. I think I had somewhere around 10 on call shifts total (though 3 of them were ER and ER for some reason basically never calls you in so those barely count) and got called in 4 times, with one of those times being a double deal.

Would have ended up with a few more shifts in a normal year, but with the in person time cut in half on some of those rotations, I only had half as many on call shifts as I'd normally have expected for those.

I really am not a person who ever wants to be on call again. I'm just on edge the whole time, have trouble sleeping or doing anything and just end up being non-productive and jumping every time my phone makes noise.
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I think the only reason that I handle on call so well is because my job right before vet school was 24/7 on call with 1 weekend and, like, 3 days off per month. I was basically off one weekend from Friday at 5 pm to Sunday at 5 pm one weekend to go back to CO to visit the fam and then 1 Saturday night off a month to go out with my bestie who still lived in town. Since I was always on call, I worked through the on call anxiety over that year, with the first several months being the worst obviously.

I specifically was not going to work for a hospital with on call however. Wasn't going to happen. The on call aspect is also part of why I didn't go for the match this year; hard to build a family going through that kind of work schedule.
 
vetmedhead said:
Our CCU rotation is similar in that we generally pick a patient or two as our primary focus, with nursing staff doing the rest - however we did pop in and out of treatments for other things as needed or if it was interesting. For example I signed up to do the scheduled chest tube maintenance on a patient that wasn't mine because I had never had a patient with chest tubes before and the nursing staff found it a little tedious, so were happy to show me how to do it and then let me take over.
Day CCU was stressful af though, you were assigned an inpatient whose primary service was critical care (bit confusing but for example things like septic patients, toxin ingestions, rattlesnake bites - basically where they didn't necessarily need to be transferred to another service but still needed CCU stays) and then had to get up to date on their super long histories, round on it after having like 20 minutes to review the whole record, use the next 20 minutes after rounds to write treatment orders for the day, SOAP them, order labs, interpret labs, fail at answering all of the resident's questions, etc. On top of this you are supposed to at least be doing treatments on your patient if not also helping with treatments on others. No chance to sit down and you had to have everything done by the end of your shift or you couldn't leave, so you often ended up staying there until like an hour later.

That on call schedule sounds killer. Also, I think between the occasional to rare cases of lepto, the plague, and tularemia our school probably has a good reason to not have us running treatments in the iso wards lol. I think students used to do it for at least some shifts a very long time ago but the kibosh probably got put on that either from exposure risk or from the fact that we are more likely to accidentally do something wrong and track stuff through the hospital since we're learning. I have had classmates who went into iso because their primary patient was in there (e.g. parvo patient) but always accompanied by a doctor or nurse, depending on what needed doing
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We only have day time CCU shifts, but I think part of that is because the faculty gtfo at 5 pm and the service itself is so new. lol. We have a CCU resident stick around until 1 am though. So I imagine that in the next few years, they'll expand it if there is demand from the student body. Currently CC is a limited free elective I got on a whim cause I did not know what else to do with the free elective (onco was unfortunately full 🙁 ). I also don't think we have a straight forward take on what goes to critical care at this point. It used to be that internal medicine was the dumping ground of the ER saying "well I have no clue" cases. Now that we have CC, I imagine anything that is maintenance for a few days and goes home will start to go to CC (toxicities, bug/snake/spider bites, etc). Currently, soft tissue keeps their crazy septic abdomens and things like that and internal med is still pretty much a dumpster fire on the daily.

For the isolation shifts, it truly does come down to that there isn't enough staff, full stop. We simply do not have enough technicians in ICU or the internal medicine service to babysit the patients or babysit us while we babysit the patients. And, frankly, I don't think the school wants to pay 3 people to babysit a single patient (since they are babysat 24 hours for the most part), when we are paying to be there (this also gets me on my soapbox about how we do so much tech work, but I digress). Interns and residents on internal medicine are also out simply because internal medicine has too full of a schedule to pull one of them from cases. The vast majority of our isolation patients are definitely parvo cases, but we've had 2 tularemia cases this last fall. Regardless, as long as we signed off on doing the biosecurity onboarding, we man those shifts.
 
batsenecal said:
The on call aspect is also part of why I didn't go for the match this year; hard to build a family going through that kind of work schedule.
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I'm not looking to build a family anytime soon, but one of the things I appreciated about the internships I've applied to is that they largely have phone on-call rather than actual call where you come it at 2 AM to un-kill something. The ones that do occasionally have you physically come in are generally pretty reasonable about it too. I've been trying to prioritize work life balance hard out of school for health reasons and it is nice talking to programs and hearing actual strategies they have for supporting that. Obviously this is something that is only really doable because I'm not going for SA rotatings, but it is nice to know it's considered.
 
Unsolicited pro-tip for 2022: Do not be that person who doesn't help their rotation mates. If you don't have a patient, come in with everyone else and help them get their patients done. If you do have a patient and you finish with your stuff before other people are done, check in with them to see what they need. Teamwork makes the dream work, especially on services like internal med and the surgeries. /mini rant after a rotation mate disappeared and did not help others
 
Last day of classes yesterday!! Just gotta survive finals and the final OSCE and all I'm thinking is: I remember looking up to the 3rd/4th yrs as a baby vet student, thinking they had so much together... now I realize we just internally scream and rely on our friends to keep us sane. How are we almost in clinics already?!
 
SkiOtter said:
4 more weeks of didactics for me! Also very much d o n e and ready for clinics
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8 more weeks...but really more like 5.
The last 3 weeks dont really count. We have 1 week of 1 class/day and a lab. Week 2 is our big clinical proficiency exam and final for course that was 1/day. Week 3 is transition to clinics so no classes and only things somedays.
9 more exams
 
oh man y'all are making me realize we have only 9 weeks left.
This semester feels like nothing since Im in half the credits with tracking. it's so weird
 
We have 12 weeks left of didactics but that's because our 4th years had such delayed clinics so they're giving them extra time. So we typically start clinics after spring break (Mid-March) and they end at spring break the year after and then you're back in the classroom (or do externships or do specialized hospital rotations) for the last 8 weeks of school (Mid-March until May). However, since that's when everything was canceled last year and our current 4th years didn't get into the clinics until late late August, instead of letting them get 8 mo of clinics, they decided to have them go all the way through May to give them 10mo. So, we're pushed back (as well as the year after us) to start clinics in May and go until May, therefore extending our didactics until end of May.
 
MixedAnimals77 said:
What would you do back in the classroom?

I'm sorry 🙁
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We would have advanced classes, like "advanced SA oncology", "advanced SA Med", "topics in SA Vet ECC" to build on what we'd learned in clinics. I like to think of it ad like our introduction to CE (apparently they're the most fun electives BUT that was coming from students who took them before the pandemic because obviously the classes have had to adjust to the fact that we haven't had clinics). Everyone is trying their best lol, I just wanna be in the hospital!
 
brgdo1994 said:
We have ~10 weeks left until clinics! Seems so close yet so far....I'm not scared or anything 😅
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Everyone (aka faculty) likes to keep casually remind us that we are going to be on clinics soon. I don't appreciate it :laugh:
I'm excited, nervous, scared, all of the above.
 
SnowJ said:
It's official, no in-person white coat ceremony for my class 😔

We are voting on whether to have a virtual ceremony or skip it altogether. I'm thinking that having a virtual one will be more sad to me than not having one at all...
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We’re doing a zoom ceremony where I believe we’re getting coated on zoom for our families to watch from elsewhere. I’m excited about it because I want *something*
 
SkiOtter said:
We’re doing a zoom ceremony where I believe we’re getting coated on zoom for our families to watch from elsewhere. I’m excited about it because I want *something*
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I got the impression that we'd essentially have to coat ourselves to avoid having everyone around each other. I could be wrong in that assumption of course

Edit: looking at the questionnaire it looks like it would be 100% virtual
 
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SkiOtter said:
We’re doing a zoom ceremony where I believe we’re getting coated on zoom for our families to watch from elsewhere. I’m excited about it because I want *something*
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We're doing the same thing. It's apparently scheduled for Mother's Day too, which has some of my classmates miffed, but I'm just happy we're getting anything really.
 
We did our white coat during our first year (it didn’t happen for this years students). During 3rd yr we normally do a pinning ceremony before heading into clinics. Officially not happening, instead the Dean will give us our pins at the end of our OSCE in two weeks.

Bright side is I’ll be done with finals at the end of this week! Honestly just hoping we get an in person graduation.... that’s all I want
 
SnowJ said:
It's official, no in-person white coat ceremony for my class 😔

We are voting on whether to have a virtual ceremony or skip it altogether. I'm thinking that having a virtual one will be more sad to me than not having one at all...
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I wish we could have voted to not have it. We are doing a virtual ceremony where we just watch everyone's pre-recorded coating videos
 
I think being able to not participate if you didn't want to might be a better option than having it just be a majority vote on whether or not to have it at all. I imagine there are people who want to have something even if it's virtual, kind of sad for them to miss out on that if the majority decides they don't want anything at all.
 
WildZoo said:
I think being able to not participate if you didn't want to might be a better option than having it just be a majority vote on whether or not to have it at all. I imagine there are people who want to have something even if it's virtual, kind of sad for them to miss out on that if the majority decides they don't want anything at all.
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I can see that being perceived as unfair. There also would definitely be pressure from families to participate for their sake, which would not be great either.

Overall there is no one solution that will make everyone happy. Personally I will probably do my own mini-ceremony for myself with my first externship since they will be doctors that have been part of my journey.
 
SnowJ said:
I can see that being perceived as unfair. There also would definitely be pressure from families to participate for their sake, which would not be great either.

Overall there is no one solution that will make everyone happy. Personally I will probably do my own mini-ceremony for myself with my first externship since they will be doctors that have been part of my journey.
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But would your families even know it’s happening if you don’t tell them
 
SkiOtter said:
But would your families even know it’s happening if you don’t tell them
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Good point, a lot of families might not know that the white coat ceremony is a thing. Though the college might make announcements about it after the fact to honor the class on social media, so they might still find out if you dont say anything.
I have a lot of doctors in my family, so they know its a tradition

Edit for clarification: I wouldnt mind an optional white coat, but I can see how it could create tension and why the faculty may be reluctant to offer it.
 
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