Someone privately emailed me this, but I thought it would be worth posting publicly for everyone else who might be wondering the same thing:
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Ma'am,
I am looking at attending USUHS and wanted to ask about your experiences during your third/fourth year. How much if any time did you have to spend in a classroom? For your clinicals were you given hands on opportunities to take responsibility for your patients or did you find yourself observing much of the time? Does USUHS participate in the greater DC/VA Hospital system for any of it's clinicals? Thank you.
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Great questions. I'm going to take your name off and publicly post them.
Classroom time: minimal 3rd and 4th year. We have what are called "intercessions" where we all come back from the clinical rotations to USU for 1-2 weeks twice a year for refresher courses (radiology, derm, EM). Also, for our Military Contingency Medicine classes 4th year (AKA Bushmaster) we spend 3 very boring but practical weeks in a classroom reviewing military med stuff. Otherwise it's site dependent: for example, right now I'm doing ER, and the interns and students have a 1/2hr-45 minute lecture every day at 1pm while we eat lunch.
Clinicals are what you make of them. Yes, I was given TONS of opportunities for procedures and real responsibility. Right now, for example, I am working with 3 interns during any given shift, and I do exactly what they do: same patient load, same procedures, ordering meds, deciding what scans to do, etc. When I was in Neurology my attending kept forgetting that I wasn't an intern, and treated me exactly the same as them. During surgery I got more OR time than the interns, and we get to do lots in the OR if we express interest. I can only say what I've been told and seen myself, and apparently we are given more independence than some civilian students (I specifically know that some Georgetown students are much less in the mix, and feel like they don't get anywhere near as much actual patient care during most of their clinicals: one Georgetown grad was complaining that he was always the 5th person to talk to a patient, and that his only good 3rd year rotation was his Medicine rotation at Walter Reed. I can also state that I was clearly much more useful than the University of Hawaii students I worked with in the Peds clinic at Tripler: after 1/2 an hour the chief resident put me, the only 3rd year USU student working that day, in charge of the four 3rd year UH students, and boy did they not have a clue what they were doing!). These are of course just anecdotes: I do NOT mean to say that all USU students are more independent than all others! But I have never worked with a group that I felt were better prepared than I or my peers were. I really do think wearing the uniform changes us from being observers to thinking of patient care as our job, as well as our teachers thinking of us as real workers and not just observers. But as in all things, you get out of the experience what you put into it.
Greater D.C. area: Yup, I did my OB/GYN at WHC in D.C., some go to the VA for neurology, Kaiser, WHC, or some hospital in Virginia for ER, St. Elizabeth's for Psych, in addition to going to all of the military hospitals in the D.C. area (NNMC, WRAMC, Ft. Belvoir, Dewitt, Ft. Meade). We also can do some clinic at the Pentagon, and smaller sites. We can of course go anywhere a military hospital is, including sites abroad. Here's the official list:
http://www.usuhs.edu/reg/site_codes.html
You can also find course info on the catalogue link.
Hope that's useful!
