To med students: When did you learn to take vitals?

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.
Kneige

Kneige

Full Member
10+ Year Member
15+ Year Member
Joined
Jan 24, 2008
Messages
149
Reaction score
0
Members don't see this ad.
Recently, I came across a very horrifying fact. Medical students don't know how to take vitals even well into their semester. True, those I talked to are first-years. But seriously. How is that allowed to happen? I would think taking vitals would be the very first thing schools teach their students.

Makes me wonder what schools mean when they say there is patient exposure within the first month of school.

It got me intrigued. Hence my question to you current med students of when you learned to take vitals or when you are going to learn.
 
Kneige said:
Recently, I came across a very horrifying fact. Medical students don't know how to take vitals even well into their semester. True, those I talked to are first-years. But seriously. How is that allowed to happen? I would think taking vitals would be the very first thing schools teach their students.

Makes me wonder what schools mean when they say there is patient exposure within the first month of school.

It got me intrigued. Hence my question to you current med students of when you learned to take vitals or when you are going to learn.
Click to expand...

Which med students were these? That's one of the things we were taught (not that we do it particularly well) back in August (we started a month earlier in July). We started talking to patients in the first week, though.
 
I'm not in med school yet, but I don't find it surprising students aren't taught how to take vitals immediately. I'm pretty sure you don't learn how to place on IV in med school either. And why should you? That's not really what medical school is there to teach you, is it? Doctors don't take patient vitals anyway, that's what us patient care techs are for. 😛
 
My wife is 4th year and she did not actually start practicing on me till end of 2nd year.
 
i learnt that senior year high school...lol
 
Myuu said:
Which med students were these? That's one of the things we were taught (not that we do it particularly well) back in August (we started a month earlier in July). We started talking to patients in the first week, though.
Click to expand...

It's good to know some schools do it. I'd rather not say which school I'm talking about though. Sorry, I don't want to risk losing annoymity.
 
Kneige said:
Recently, I came across a very horrifying fact. Medical students don't know how to take vitals even well into their semester. True, those I talked to are first-years. But seriously. How is that allowed to happen? I would think taking vitals would be the very first thing schools teach their students.

Makes me wonder what schools mean when they say there is patient exposure within the first month of school.

It got me intrigued. Hence my question to you current med students of when you learned to take vitals or when you are going to learn.
Click to expand...

This isn't "horrifying" - rather it just shows your lack of understanding of how medical schools structure their educational process.

The first two years of medical school, and especially the first year, are structured around teaching the basic sciences. Most schools "teach" history taking and physical examination in the second year (but you won't actually become competent at either until 3rd year when you get more experience).

At my school, the first year contains no structured teaching of physical examination skills (e.g. taking vitals). Now if you ask our first years about the Krebs' cycle or have them draw the brachial plexus - get ready to be impressed. They are learning the appropriate material for that stage of their education - which does not include vital taking.
 
Ras Tafari said:
I'm not in med school yet, but I don't find it surprising students aren't taught how to take vitals immediately. I'm pretty sure you don't learn how to place on IV in med school either. And why should you? That's not really what medical school is there to teach you, is it? Doctors don't take patient vitals anyway, that's what us patient care techs are for. 😛
Click to expand...

Interesting thought. But I would seriously doubt the ability of a doctor who doesn't know how to take vitals. Probably would switch clinics if I come across one. My thought is that it's important for people to start learning things from the very bottom. That's how you form strong foundations. Without that, there'll be nothing much to build upon.

I probably am just being very backward cuz I hate those BP machines. I feel like only well-taught people can collect accurate data.
 
We learned how to take blood pressures on the second day of school. We also got an overview on our stethoscopes, but we're now learning how to listen for particular heart/lung sounds. It's not surprising that some students don't yet know how to take vitals. When schools say patient exposure, they don't necessarily mean touching the patients. They mean interviewing them, etc.

We learned to draw blood on one another, but the only thing we've done with the standardized patients so far is interview them.
 
Kneige said:
That's how you form strong foundations. Without that, there'll be nothing much to build upon.
Click to expand...

I think you're severely overestimating vital-taking. LOL. It takes five minutes to learn how to take vitals. Vitals isn't the foundation. What's being taught in first year are the foundations.
 
Kneige said:
Interesting thought. But I would seriously doubt the ability of a doctor who doesn't know how to take vitals. Probably would switch clinics if I come across one. My thought is that it's important for people to start learning things from the very bottom. That's how you form strong foundations. Without that, there'll be nothing much to build upon.

I probably am just being very backward cuz I hate those BP machines. I feel like only well-taught people can collect accurate data.
Click to expand...

I didn't mean that doctors don't need to know how to take vitals. Of course they should know basic things like that. I completely support building a strong foundation...I feel like my experience working as a patient care tech is going to be invaluable to me down the road. At least I won't fumble around like an idiot the first time I take a patient's BP or draw blood as a med student because I'll have done that stuff hundreds of times. 🙂
 
I learned to take vitals sometime early 2nd year. (I think they've since revised the curriculum so they're doing it earlier in 1st year now)

Incidentally, I'm a good chunk into my 3rd year and I've maybe been asked to take 1 BP so far. Vitals are definitely an important skill to learn, but they're not something you'll be doing often.
 
Our school has first-year clinical preceptorships during which most students, if they don't know before matriculating, learn how to take vitals. There is also a standardized physical examination course during the end of our MS-1.

That said, the first two years of med sch (unless you go somewhere with a unique curriculum, like Duke), are about learning anatomy, pathophysiology of disease, pharmacology, etc. A school that doesn't teach exam skills early or even in the first year isn't bad or below average. That's just how things work.
 
I learned probably October of this year (MS1). We started having patient contact the second week (live patients, not standardized), but we did other parts of the physical exam first (interview, then upper extremity, then lower extremity).

Different schools just do it at different times. As long as you learn it before clinicals start, it probably doesn't matter that much when you learn it.
 
Kneige said:
Interesting thought. But I would seriously doubt the ability of a doctor who doesn't know how to take vitals. Probably would switch clinics if I come across one. My thought is that it's important for people to start learning things from the very bottom. That's how you form strong foundations. Without that, there'll be nothing much to build upon.

I probably am just being very backward cuz I hate those BP machines. I feel like only well-taught people can collect accurate data.
Click to expand...

You are seriously way out of your league commenting on what is/isn't important to learn during the preclinical years of medical school. In the grand scheme of things, taking vitals isn't a huge need-to-know in terms of the overall practice of medicine; it takes about one clinical skills session to learn them, anyway.

Besides, why does it matter that 1st/2nd years don't know how to take them? It's not like they're ever going to use them in practice during preclinical years, anyway.
 
We were taught how to take vitals within the first few weeks of medical school. I agree with what others have said that you don't need to know how to take vitals during your pre-clinical years but I would certainly feel like an idiot if I made it through 4 years of college as a premed and months/years of medical school and didn't even know how to use a frickin blood pressure cuff or check someone's pulse. If my school didn't teach us how to take vitals I'm sure I would have taken the 5 minutes it takes to learn it on my own before too long.

Whether or not you are taught how to take vitals during years 1/2 depends a lot on the school. Some schools don't give you much opportunity to interact with patients, visit the clinic, use your stethoscope, etc. I think schools like this are becoming the minority though as most people I know at other med schools are taught the very basics of clinical medicine during the first two years.
 
I'm a M1. So far, we've learned how to take a history, vitals, heart/lung exam, upper extremity exam, deltoid injections, and blood draws. Between now and May we're learning HEENT, abdomen, lower extremity, and male/female GU exams.

We also have pretty frequent standardized patients as well as a House Call program to hone our patient communication and H&P skills. In addition we have a summer preceptorship where we rotate through a doctor's office for 2 weeks.
 
Kneige said:
It's good to know some schools do it. I'd rather not say which school I'm talking about though. Sorry, I don't want to risk losing annoymity.
Click to expand...
Good call. The SDNquisition has broken down a few pre-meds' doors over the year and hauled them off to the gallows.
 
Kneige said:
Makes me wonder what schools mean when they say there is patient exposure within the first month of school.
Click to expand...
HIGHLY overrated. As an M4, let me just tell you how painfully unprepared you will feel at the beginning of M3 when you start dealing with patients constantly. It's much worse as an M1/M2. You really don't have much to offer, and it just makes things awkward.

It got me intrigued. Hence my question to you current med students of when you learned to take vitals or when you are going to learn.
Click to expand...
I knew from being an EMT, but they taught us BP skills about a month or two into M1.
 
We learned how to take vitals during our orientation. Since then, we've had fairly frequent standardized patient interviews, and three "intro to physical exam sessions." We have learned how to do a complete physical, minus the gynecological aspects (which we do during M2).
 
TheProwler said:
HIGHLY overrated. As an M4, let me just tell you how painfully unprepared you will feel at the beginning of M3 when you start dealing with patients constantly. It's much worse as an M1/M2. You really don't have much to offer, and it just makes things awkward.
Click to expand...

I think that's kind of variable between different schools. I might still feel painfully unprepared at the beginning of clinicals, but I don't think I'm completely useless. My preceptor has me basically take the history and vitals for all of his patients (HPI for sure, full if it's a new patient) before he comes in to see them, and if there's any additional lag time between when I'm done getting the history and when he's done with his previous patient, I have free reign to sorta just practice whatever semi-relevant physical exam pieces I feel like while the patient's waiting. Obviously I think he'd live without us coming in once every two weeks, but I don't feel completely useless at least, and I do think I'm learning SOMETHING.
 
It can depend. If a school has a student clinic, you can learn pretty early. Or if you get a mentor, they can teach you. You will definitely learn by the beginning of 3rd year, which is when you really need it, so don't worry.
 
Like everyone said, it really depends on the curriculum and what the school wishes to emphasize. We were taught how to take vitals right away because we start clinical precepting right away. When the fall rolled in, we started to learn how to do the basic injections (IM, tuberculin, etc). While I agree it's not absolutely necessary to learn these right away, I think one of my profs said it best that if you can't do something as easy as take vitals well, then the patient will lose some trust in you and that's the last thing you need as a med student.
 
It's not a really big deal since once 3rd year rolls around almost everyone is on the same level. And really, I haven't had a take a vital since starting 3rd year. That's the reason hospitals have nurses.
 
I learned when I was working at a clinic, but the school taught us in our first semester. It's useless, though, unless you're getting to practice a ton. You'll never learn without doing it over and over.
 
We 'learned' first term but the doc just said, go take a bp. So you would go and do it, but it's not like the doc would then take the bp so that you could know if it was correct or not. One time I had clinic duty and worked with another med student from another school, and him and I both took bps, with different cuffs, and got 2 pretty different numbers. The doc then took it, and her number was different but inbetween the numbers the two of us got. When we practiced on each other, it seems like everyone had a bp of 140/80. You'd think there would be some variety, but there wasn't. I know the nursing students are bp tested by using a stethoscope with 2 ear pieces, but no one ever checked the med students.

When we did breath sounds, we again practice on each other, so when it comes to things like wheezing, crackles, we don't know what they sound like, cause none of our classmates were suffering from them at the time.
 
We don't learn to do vitals first because they try to teach us that it's so much more important to do a patient history before doing a physical exam. Vitals are just numbers until we actually talk to the patient. This is why they teach us vitals later on (we only just went over taking vitals signs), to dispel this idea that we should reduce the patient to numbers.
 
Kneige said:
Recently, I came across a very horrifying fact. Medical students don't know how to take vitals even well into their semester. True, those I talked to are first-years. But seriously. How is that allowed to happen? I would think taking vitals would be the very first thing schools teach their students.
Click to expand...

I'm shocked and appalled.
 
Kneige said:
Recently, I came across a very horrifying fact. Medical students don't know how to take vitals even well into their semester. True, those I talked to are first-years. But seriously. How is that allowed to happen? I would think taking vitals would be the very first thing schools teach their students.

Makes me wonder what schools mean when they say there is patient exposure within the first month of school.

It got me intrigued. Hence my question to you current med students of when you learned to take vitals or when you are going to learn.
Click to expand...
hahaha, please. Why is this HORRIFYING? Who friggin cares? While most medical schools will include some clinical experience during basic science years (first two years), its not THAT important of a skill to master at that time. Students have plenty of opportunities to develop their physical exam skills during 3rd year clerkships.

Frankly, even resident physicians are lousy at a number of routine medical procedures. I sure as crap wouldn't want a resident to put an IV line into me.
 
So you learn most clinical skills during 3rd year 🙁 ... I am going to go nuts with all this "basic science" crap without any clinical exposure. Hopefully the clinical correlations will help keep my interest up. (this is me talking during finals week right now, taking 4 science finals next week that are 400 level and senioritis x10)
 
LovelyBRass said:
We don't learn to do vitals first because they try to teach us that it's so much more important to do a patient history before doing a physical exam. Vitals are just numbers until we actually talk to the patient. This is why they teach us vitals later on (we only just went over taking vitals signs), to dispel this idea that we should reduce the patient to numbers.
Click to expand...

My school does this too. Our clinical skills course is entirely about history taking for the first semester.
 
J DUB said:
I learned how to do it in pharm school as well as volunteering in the ER...I can bust out some vitals....:laugh:
Click to expand...


i "learned" how to do this working in the er too - just shadowing and volunteering. as a shadow, I was pretty much a historian or scribe it seemed like...
 
Ras Tafari said:
I'm not in med school yet, but I don't find it surprising students aren't taught how to take vitals immediately. I'm pretty sure you don't learn how to place on IV in med school either. And why should you? That's not really what medical school is there to teach you, is it? Doctors don't take patient vitals anyway, that's what us patient care techs are for. 😛
Click to expand...

We learned in the first month, and we had blood pressure testing with the double eared stethoscope thingy.

We also learned how to place IVs, and I placed a lot during my mandatory anesthesia core rotation.
 
Kneige said:
Recently, I came across a very horrifying fact. Medical students don't know how to take vitals even well into their semester. True, those I talked to are first-years. But seriously. How is that allowed to happen? I would think taking vitals would be the very first thing schools teach their students.

Makes me wonder what schools mean when they say there is patient exposure within the first month of school.

It got me intrigued. Hence my question to you current med students of when you learned to take vitals or when you are going to learn.
Click to expand...
overrated
not really that important nor does it take long to learn
i'd rather study than spend an hour in foundations with an SP

you're not backwards, just ignorant. you are not qualified to judge what is proper medical education.
 
I learned to take vitals in a CNA class and practice regularly at work (tech). I learned to take glucose and O2 readings on the job. Same thing for orthostatic blood pressure, oxygen saturation... I have studied and watched videos of things such as heart murmurs but haven't had the pleasure to hear them at work yet, though I hope to soon.

I understand the reasons a med student may not know these, but let me say, I believe it would tremendously help them to take the time to learn, because it immediately makes all the academia you are learning day in and day out much more grounded in real life, at least IMHO.
 
summerallwinter said:
I learned to take vitals in a CNA class and practice regularly at work (tech). I learned to take glucose and O2 readings on the job. Same thing for orthostatic blood pressure, oxygen saturation... I have studied and watched videos of things such as heart murmurs but haven't had the pleasure to hear them at work yet, though I hope to soon.

I understand the reasons a med student may not know these, but let me say, I believe it would tremendously help them to take the time to learn, because it immediately makes all the academia you are learning day in and day out much more grounded in real life, at least IMHO.
Click to expand...

It only makes you feel grounded if you do it day in and day out; spending two hours in a clinical skills session learning them and hardly using those skills again afterward doesn't really cut it for me.
 
summerallwinter said:
I learned to take vitals in a CNA class and practice regularly at work (tech). I learned to take glucose and O2 readings on the job. Same thing for orthostatic blood pressure, oxygen saturation... I have studied and watched videos of things such as heart murmurs but haven't had the pleasure to hear them at work yet, though I hope to soon.

I understand the reasons a med student may not know these, but let me say, I believe it would tremendously help them to take the time to learn, because it immediately makes all the academia you are learning day in and day out much more grounded in real life, at least IMHO.
Click to expand...

Please tell me how understanding the Krebs cycle or human anatomy relates to taking a blood pressure past knowing what the brachial artery is.

...and yes, we learned how to take a blood pressure within the first few months and have already had 7 standardized patient encounters with 2 of them requiring a full set of vital signs (optional on a third one. The other 4 were either history taking or a communication drill).
 
summerallwinter said:
I learned to take vitals in a CNA class and practice regularly at work (tech). I learned to take glucose and O2 readings on the job. Same thing for orthostatic blood pressure, oxygen saturation... I have studied and watched videos of things such as heart murmurs but haven't had the pleasure to hear them at work yet, though I hope to soon.

I understand the reasons a med student may not know these, but let me say, I believe it would tremendously help them to take the time to learn, because it immediately makes all the academia you are learning day in and day out much more grounded in real life, at least IMHO.
Click to expand...

learning clinical skills for an hour and then never using them until 3rd and 4th year doesn't make you grounded.
 
To those saying learning vitals are a waste of time compared to how directly useful they are - while I understand they are not feasibly relatable to the Krebs cycle - they are directly relatable to pathophysiology in a number of aspects, of course. This is all strictly in my opinion, but take BP for example... yes as a doctor you may arguably never take a patient's BP ever, only see it listed as a number on a chart or computer. But listening to the diastolic and systolic sounds, being able to identify which to measure, by taking a manual blood pressure - surely this puts an anatomical diagram of the same effect into a more tangible perspective? I guess ultimately it comes down to individual learning styles, but I know anything I can apply out of class into my daily life, I tend to learn with more ease.

And regarding doing it day in and day out... it took me probably 3-4 days (some people less) of taking my friend's and own BP manually to feel that I could get an accurate reading very consistently. That being said, I have taken BP manually twice the entire time I've worked as a tech. The chances of not being able to use a machine to do it are slim to none. But still I could take it manually if need be, accurately, as could anyone who took a few days to learn it. And anyways even spending 1 day learning it will give you a hands on lesson on systolic and diastolic BP.

I am not trying to start an argument here but I do believe there is a validity to learning vital signs before med school, but not everyone has to or will agree with me, and I by no means am implying it's that big of a deal as to how good of a doctor you'll become or anything like that.
 
summerallwinter said:
To those saying learning vitals are a waste of time compared to how directly useful they are - while I understand they are not feasibly relatable to the Krebs cycle - they are directly relatable to pathophysiology in a number of aspects, of course. This is all strictly in my opinion, but take BP for example... yes as a doctor you may arguably never take a patient's BP ever, only see it listed as a number on a chart or computer. But listening to the diastolic and systolic sounds, being able to identify which to measure, by taking a manual blood pressure - surely this puts an anatomical diagram of the same effect into a more tangible perspective? I guess ultimately it comes down to individual learning styles, but I know anything I can apply out of class into my daily life, I tend to learn with more ease.
Click to expand...
Err... anyone else see a problem with the underlined? Specifically what the 5th Korotkoff 'sounds' like?

Short of the specifics like "don't take a blood pressure on the side of a mastectomy," the act of taking a blood pressure isn't that connected. You can understand the concepts of something like a blood pressure without obtaining it. Afterall, we aren't floating Swain-Ganz catheters when we learn about pulmonary wedge pressures (on that note, any volunteers to let 220 first year medical students insert Swain-Ganz caths?). Similarly, do we really need to be placing arterial lines for invasive blood pressures when we learn how blood pressure varies over the cardiac cycle?

And regarding doing it day in and day out... it took me probably 3-4 days (some people less) of taking my friend's and own BP manually to feel that I could get an accurate reading very consistently. That being said, I have taken BP manually twice the entire time I've worked as a tech. The chances of not being able to use a machine to do it are slim to none. But still I could take it manually if need be, accurately, as could anyone who took a few days to learn it. And anyways even spending 1 day learning it will give you a hands on lesson on systolic and diastolic BP.

I am not trying to start an argument here but I do believe there is a validity to learning vital signs before med school, but not everyone has to or will agree with me, and I by no means am implying it's that big of a deal as to how good of a doctor you'll become or anything like that.
Click to expand...

I don't think that anyone here is arguing that we don't need to know how to take a blood pressure. What's being questioned is the validity of the notion that we need to know how to take a blood pressure in the first semester or not.

Finally, your last paragraph directly contradicts itself. If there is validity that medical students need to learn vital signs as a premed, why does it not affect the quality of physician graduated?
 
summerallwinter said:
I understand the reasons a med student may not know these, but let me say, I believe it would tremendously help them to take the time to learn, because it immediately makes all the academia you are learning day in and day out much more grounded in real life, at least IMHO.
Click to expand...
summerallwinter said:
To those saying learning vitals are a waste of time compared to how directly useful they are - while I understand they are not feasibly relatable to the Krebs cycle - they are directly relatable to pathophysiology in a number of aspects, of course. This is all strictly in my opinion, but take BP for example... yes as a doctor you may arguably never take a patient's BP ever, only see it listed as a number on a chart or computer. But listening to the diastolic and systolic sounds, being able to identify which to measure, by taking a manual blood pressure - surely this puts an anatomical diagram of the same effect into a more tangible perspective? I guess ultimately it comes down to individual learning styles, but I know anything I can apply out of class into my daily life, I tend to learn with more ease.
Click to expand...
As a doctor, I think its a waste of your free time practicing physical exam skills during your first two years of medical school when you should instead devote as much time as possible in the library reading up on disease and the rest getting enough sleep/food/exercise/hold-on-your-sanity-by-complaining-about-life-on-SDN. I guarantee that you will have more than enough time to hone your physical exams skills in the hospital during your clinical years in medical school as well as in residency.

That said... it takes maybe 5 minutes to learn all the things you just mentioned, and you could master all of it in one afternoon volunteering at any clinic/health fair.
 
I think seeing patients is a great way of reminding yourself when you're studying so much. You need to realize that you can translate your bookwork into a real case and not see them as completely separate entities.

Remembering that the femoral artery is about in the middle of the inguinal ligament will save you a lot of awkward moments when you're digging around your SP's crotch.
 
armybound said:
I think seeing patients is a great way of reminding yourself when you're studying so much. You need to realize that you can translate your bookwork into a real case and not see them as completely separate entities.

Remembering that the femoral artery is about in the middle of the inguinal ligament will save you a lot of awkward moments when you're digging around your SP's crotch.
Click to expand...

I agree with this. Clinical exposure, to me, in the first 2 years is less about learning about management of diseases/diagnosis and more about just seeing medicine in practice and learning to be comfortable talking with patients. I think it's valuable.

If nothing else, I can at least remember all the components of an H&P and not bumble around as much with patients as I did last year.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

2026PreMed
What do people mean when they tell you to do "research" ?
Replies
12
Views
950
2026PreMed
2026PreMed
Y
When to Negotiate Financial Aid?
Replies
6
Views
967
drcdbby
D
T
When to submit my AAMC application?
Replies
5
Views
1K
Topiary56
T
C
How does a W affect my chances when applying to a competitive med school?
Replies
5
Views
1K
YellowSalamander
Y
U
When Should I Take the MCAT? (Non-Trad Plan)
Replies
8
Views
451
g0ldendoodle
G
Top