Is this common?

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ciestar

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I shadowed a DO over the past few days. He's an opthalmologist (retinal specialty) and there's only two doctors in the practice but they never work on the same day. They have maybe 3 or 4 offices that span like 200 miles and travel to them all weekly. When I was there he saw about 60 patients in 12 hours. He did his dictations in the room with the patient (is this unusual?)

Is this a common occurrence or just evidence that this area is underserved medically? Granted this is a highly specialized practice, even so, in a given week the doctor I shadowed could see over 200 patients.

I'm also wondering if this would be at all useful in a PS?
 
That comes out to a little less than 15 min per patient. Not that unusual nowadays. As for dictation, depends on the doc's style. Some do their notes in the room with the patient, and some after. It doesn't really matter. I don't know about the distance for sure (I think that does lend credence to medically underserved), but it's also not unusual to have multiple offices for a private practice (or even a hospital-employed doctor, with a bunch of hospitals opening up community-based clinics for outpatient care).

In your PS, you can definitely talk about your shadowing experiences. But the focus should be more on how it affected you and what you learned. Was there a specific moment that really encouraged you to go into medicine? Since it's a medically underserved area, how did you observe that affecting the patients and how, if it did, did that influence your decision to become a doctor? Etc.
 
I didn't mention this before, but it really did affect the patient. Many had wait times once they showed up to the office of over 2 hours, and if they needed treatments (eye injections, laser treatment, pictures of their retinas) they could be there 4 hours. So yes, i think it bears some significance.
 
The neuroophthalmologist at my university does dictations with the patients in the room. I always found it kinda rude.

We have bi-weekly to monthly clinics at remote sites for some of our peds subspecialists as well. Makes it easier to get in with the provider, since the patients don't have to drive hours to get to the main site. But having clinics spread so far in private practice isn't something I've encountered much before.

At any rate, you could certainly talk about all this in your PS.
 
I would not make it the centerpiece of your personal statement and you should tread carefully when incorporating it into your PS. What exactly is your point in including it? That this experience opened your eyes to how inequitable health care delivery is to the under-served? That this motivates you to become a compassionate physician, etc etc etc?

If you ever had to read a bunch of personal statements while screening through hundreds of applications, you would know how dreadful it can be to read them. This is why a great PS can help you, a bad one will crush you, and an average or mediocre one won't help your odds out and will give the impression that you're just another one of hundreds of people saying the same tired old thing. Of course you have to weigh the risk of getting too creative or risky, there are places that will burn you for that. Maybe it's safest to pick the conventional route that everyone else goes with.

Anyway, in my opinion, use the personal statement to add something interesting or, ... shocker ... , PERSONAL, about who YOU are that the committee would not have known from the rest of your application. Avoid rehashing things that are elsewhere in your application, unless it's something more meaningful than one day of shadowing.
 
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