Pocket reference

[bla_3x]

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I start my first year clinical preceptorship soon and I have been place with a hosptialist. This is great b/c I really wanted some early experience with inpatient care.

Any advise on a reference that would be useful for such an experience? Thanks!

 

[frog4brooke]

For most of your rotations you will need a Maxwell (has normal labs, ect.), our bookstore always runs out of these when people start their clinicals.

You will need a pharmacopea-I use tarascon on my palm (some use epocrates).

For Medicine I carried the Merk Manual-heavy but quite useful. Some of my classmated used Feri instead.

You should be set-some people also use pateint trackers, note cards, ect. I always felt these were a bigger pain then they were worth.

Good luck-
B

Also you may want to look on the clinical rotations forum.

 

[gomezjl]

frog4brooke is right on the money. Another great reference that I used was the Medicine Current Clinical Strategies pocket book. You can get it as an Adobe Acrobat pdf file as well. This book gives you the basic admission orders for many common complaints. Another very small reference is the Internal Medicine Handbook. It's very small 🙂 and red, published by Scrub Hill Press. It has lots of condensed info, lab values...everything from heart murmurs to procedure diagrams. Hope this helps and good luck!

 

[bla_3x]

Awsome, thanks a bunch!

 

[ckent]

Nothing beats a palm pilot as a resource. You should be able to get everything from epocrates to normal lab values to med math for free on your palm. 5 Minute Clinical consult and Dorland's dictionary on your palm will make your white coat a lot lighter too (very important in the wards).

 

[adrianclark]

Maybe these suggestions are aimed at UK junior doctors more than our US colleagues, but the Oxford handbooks are really good:

Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine (for medicine and surgery) - J. M. Longmore, R.A. Hope, Murray Longmore, Ian Wilkinson, Estee Torok - ISBN: 0192629883;

Oxford Handbook of Clinical Specialties (for O&G, paeds, ENT, primary care, etc) - Judith Collier, Murray Longmore, Peter Scally - ISBN: 0198525184;

Oxford Handbook of Acute Medicine (for on-call in medicine, probably more suitable for 2nd year residents (SHOs in UK) - Punit S. Ramrakha, Kevin P.K. Moore - ISBN: 0192626825;

There are also more specialist handbooks for surgery, general practice, haematology, ...

The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine is a bright yellow and green pocket-sized book. It's called the "cheese and onion" or "the yellow book" amongst students and house officers in the UK. EVERYONE has one! It covers everything, from clinical method to normal values, from management of medical emergencies to management of the difficult feelings that being a first-year doc on the wards can engender in us.

I would recommend taking a look at these books. I'm sure their content will cross the Atlantic very well, save the spelling of words like paediatrics and haematemesis!

Adrian.

 

[FionaS]

oedema, anaemia, hyponatraemia, oesophagus - it begins with an o people 😉 Haematology. Paediatrics. Orthopaedics. What's with all this sulphur spelt with an f?!?

j/k

Get yourself a palm, then get yourself a good pharm reference (I use the BNF which is a UK thing - the British National Formulary and a pain to get for Palm..., most americans seem to use ePocrates), a good gen med ref (Yellow book for me), a patient tracker if you want one (I just set up a spreadsheet), and a medical calculator (there are hundreds of these).

Best thing about Palms, is that you can just keep on adding books to them, you don't have to stop carrying one to start carrying another.

 

[PTCA]

any specific palm model you guys would suggest?

 

[PTjay]

I really like the new Palm Tungsten E (no I'm not a resident yet, but I have a Palm M500 and I have a lot of the above programs on it for my acute care PT reference).

Anyway, http://www.palmone.com/us/products/handhelds/#tungsten-e
go here to find a comparison of the newest models. tungsten e is very reasonably priced (my black and white m500 was $320 when i got it, this one is $200)- screen to rival the Sony model - and has everything you will ever need (you can even turn it into an MP3 player). the t2 is nice but I don't think voice memo or bluetooth are worth the extra $130.

the tungsten e puts the m505 to shame with it's screen alone not to mention tons more memory and faster processor. i was seriously considering upgrading to a Sony until this new line came out.

just make sure you comparison shop, get word/excel/powerpoint compatability (standard on palm but i'm sure others as well) and get a good price.