My school does our three full-time clinical affiliations in the third year, once have completed all of our coursework and passed comprehensive exams. I am in the third week of my first affiliation, at an outpatient orthopedic clinic. So far I have mainly just been taking patients through their ther ex and taking a history during the evals. I have not had an opportunity to do much manual work yet (the clinic is very manual) or practice my eval skills.
Talking with my classmates, it seems like everyone is going at extremely different paces - some of them were doing evals the first day and already have their own caseload and some (like me) are at the other end of the spectrum. I understand that this can vary a lot depending on your CI and familiarity with the setting, but I can't help but worry that this makes me "behind" (we are supposed to be at 50% entry level caseload by the end of the clinical). This is my only outpatient orthopedic clinical and I am concerned that I am not gaining the skills I need. I have expressed the need/want to start doing some more manual therapy with my CI, and have reminded her that I need to be at 50% caseload by the end of 12 weeks, and the only change has been that she took some time between patients the other day to let me practice some ankle mobilizations on her (but I have not been able to practice on patients since then), and has started allowing me to take measurements for re-evals.
It would be one thing if this was the only limitation and she was being careful and explaining everything to me so that when I do start having my own patients, I have better clinical reasoning. However, she rarely at all asks me questions/challenges me and I find I am constantly asking her questions about her clinical reasoning and she has short answers that don't help to explain her reasoning at all. I am often unsatisfied with the answers, and don't know how to get more out of her (or maybe she is just not thinking into clinical reasoning that much?). What do I do? I'm frustrated reading and hearing about my classmates experiences and how much they are learning when I feel like I am not learning much at all. I've heard people say that your first job is where you learn everything and that clinicals are just something you have to "get through." But I'm stressing a lot over this and feel as if I'm being cheated out of a good learning opportunity.
BTW - I asked her the first day and she has had about 3 students before me, but none from my school.
Talking with my classmates, it seems like everyone is going at extremely different paces - some of them were doing evals the first day and already have their own caseload and some (like me) are at the other end of the spectrum. I understand that this can vary a lot depending on your CI and familiarity with the setting, but I can't help but worry that this makes me "behind" (we are supposed to be at 50% entry level caseload by the end of the clinical). This is my only outpatient orthopedic clinical and I am concerned that I am not gaining the skills I need. I have expressed the need/want to start doing some more manual therapy with my CI, and have reminded her that I need to be at 50% caseload by the end of 12 weeks, and the only change has been that she took some time between patients the other day to let me practice some ankle mobilizations on her (but I have not been able to practice on patients since then), and has started allowing me to take measurements for re-evals.
It would be one thing if this was the only limitation and she was being careful and explaining everything to me so that when I do start having my own patients, I have better clinical reasoning. However, she rarely at all asks me questions/challenges me and I find I am constantly asking her questions about her clinical reasoning and she has short answers that don't help to explain her reasoning at all. I am often unsatisfied with the answers, and don't know how to get more out of her (or maybe she is just not thinking into clinical reasoning that much?). What do I do? I'm frustrated reading and hearing about my classmates experiences and how much they are learning when I feel like I am not learning much at all. I've heard people say that your first job is where you learn everything and that clinicals are just something you have to "get through." But I'm stressing a lot over this and feel as if I'm being cheated out of a good learning opportunity.
BTW - I asked her the first day and she has had about 3 students before me, but none from my school.