Quoted: Confidence Issue

[SoCuteMD]

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First of all, thank you to anyone who reads the following and can provide any kind of help or advice for my current situation. Also, I do not have many posts on this forum, so if I am posting this in the wrong area please forgive my error.

I currently work in a phase 1 clinic that accepts people who donate themselves temporarily for research in pharmaceuticals. I am new to performing blood collections that are time dependent. When attempting to do so, I begin focusing on not making a mistake and result in doing so despite my intention. My company is downsizing currently and I'm afraid that if I am let go and my technique is the basis for such, it will effect my chances of acceptance in medical school. If anyone has any advice that may help me in improving this I would very much appreciate it. If I have posted this in the wrong area or if this is not something to be addressed here, I apologize.

I wouldn't be as concerned about what being laid off will do for your application. You can always find another job and say you "pursued other opportunities" or if you can't find another (comparable) job, you can sign up for a few classes and work part time somewhere. That way you can just say that you chose a different opportunity as it would allow you to continue your education.

What I would be concerned with is your lack of confidence and your "focus on not making a mistake." I always think it's trouble to go through a task saying "I can't screw this up, I can't screw this up." You only end up freaking yourself out and...screwing up. A much better approach is to develop a system, a routine, and to go through that routine every time you perform a task. For example, if that task is drawing blood I first make sure I have all my supplies and I go through my mental checklist: alcohol swab, tourniquet, needle, adapter, vacutainer, gauze, labels, biohazard bag, bandaid. I make my list in the order I will need things, and in the beginning I would run through the task in my mind.

Once I have the patient sitting in front of me, I lay everything out. I open the gauze and bandaid partially, I set up my needle but leave the cover on, I lay out my vacutainers in the correct order, and then I tie the tourniquet on the patient. I continue this way until everything is done, checking it off mentally as I go. I know it sounds really slow and inefficient, but it was only that way for the first few days. After that it became quick and routine.

If you go into medicine as a career, you will be learning and new skills for a number of years. If you focus on the end result (i.e. "I have to do this RIGHT") rather than the process, you will only freak yourself out.

Best of !

 

[Febrifuge]

Venipuncture, in my experience (which is probably 3000 sticks or so), is a lot like baseball. Or golf, if you prefer. You can only think about it so much. You can only do so much planning. Mostly, you have to get out there and practice at it. Sure, you need your equipment, you need to have your prep done for each at-bat (or swing), but in the end it's all you and how you use your tools.

Sure, there's such a thing as natural talent, but if David Ortiz (or Tiger Woods) decided to just take six months off and eat chips in front of the TV, natural talent wouldn't amount to much on that first day back.

The trick to anything, especially in medicine, is to understand that good results come from experience, and experience comes from bad results. Don't concentrate on NOT making mistakes -- it's impossible. Even Ortiz or Woods will occasionally do something so spectacularly bad you'd think they were rookies. What they've done to make those occasions so very rare is to learn from every mistake they've ever made, and then concentrate on learning from and not repeating those same mistakes.

And that's the secret: stop making the same mistakes more than once. Make entirely new mistakes, and learn from them as well. That's how you get to be a champion at something.