Hi Christie,
I currently host a student extern from PCO. They have recently changed their curriculum so the students begin external rotations in the middle of their 3rd year (am I right) ...as opposed to at the end of their 3rd year.
The guy I have now is seeing a wide variety of patients---about 75% medical. He's here with me for 4-5 months, then to a VA hospital for 6 months or so, then to a comanagement center for 4-6 months and then back to school for the exciting pediatric tour before graduating
.
I think this is great. I can't say how many patients he will see in all but I know he will see around 1,400 pts in my office and will range from routine to cataract post-ops, glaucoma, diabetics, ARMD, contact lenses and some low vision. He's done a few corneal/conj. foreign body removals and inserted a few punctal plugs. Had a case of Duane's Syndrome and commotio retinae recently for him to see. I know he will see many at the VA and the comangement center in addition to those seen in school. How many total he will see, I don't know.
but I guess it to be 4,000-7,000 (?) by the time he graduates.
In my office, the extern is built up gradually to doing their own exam with me checking afterwards. He gets to shadow a cataract, retinal, glaucoma and corneal Ophthalmologist for general knowledge and to view some surgeries.
It hasn't always been like this. An OD that recently retired that graduated in 1958 told me he saw 30 patients in school before graduating. Of course, these were all refractive because that's all they could do back then.
I agree with Dr. Doan. We need to see more patients and I'm glad the schools of Optometry have provided more of an opportunity for students to do this.
By the way, many of the OD schools are located in the inner cities. I went to Memphis where the location provided us with a steady supply of diabetic and glaucoma patients (in addition to alcoholics and addicts..........and not all of them were students
). The only problem there is that we had 120 students all trying to see them.
