Volunteer Opportunities

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Wanderer259

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I have the chance to volunteer at a local hospital in three different areas.

1) Patient transport
2) CVOU (Cardiovascular something I can't remember)
3) Pre-op

I'm told the transport option will give me more direct contact with patients, but it doesn't exactly sound like clinical experience to me. The other two will have me doing less direction interaction but I'll be volunteering in an actual department.

Any suggestions which would be best to go with here or does anybody have any insight on either of these three they can share?

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I've been a patient transporter....Pretty much a lot of running around at times...and then you have your times where you just sit around for hours... You learn the ropes of the hospital... and you do get quite a bit of patient interaction.. but nothing to fulfilling...as far as the others go i'm not to sure...maybe that will help a little
 
Go with the transport thing. I say this because I think that interaction with patients always looks better to an adcom than medical EC's that minimize patient contact.

Also, from my experience, the patient interaction EC's were always more fulfilling for me personally. I mean, it was a way of doing an EC that ended up being more than just a line on a resume...it really meant something. Anyway..that's just my way of looking at it.

hey...do all 3. Why not?
 
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You'll learn a lot about patients if you do the patient transport thing
 
I wanted to volunteer at the hospital somehow where I could get exposed to the medical side of things and the doctors. Instead, I was assigned to go into patients' rooms and just talk with them. It sounds like it will be a good experience, but am I just wasting my time when I wanted to gain more exposure to actual medicine?
 
If you have good people/patient skills, id say take the one that deals with less patient contact....cause:

1. if u interact more with patients, u interact less with the doctors
2. if u interact with more doctors, use ur people skills to network, then use those networking skills to get a deez letter of recommendation
 
Went and checked and I'm pretty sure the CVOU is the cardiac catherization lab the hospital has.

I was thinking that doing patient transport was more likely due to scheduling issues (the others would require me to up at the hospital at 6 am before class once a week while the transport department just needs me after class for four hours once a week), but it does seem to give me little exposure to medicine. I may just have to make cold calls up to the university to see if there are any attendings/residents that are willing to let me shadow them for that, however.
 
I did patient transport for a while. The benefits of that, in my opinion, are that you see how important every person is in the hospital setting are and you get tons of patient exposure. Also, it's something that pre-meds can actually do. It actually helps when volunteers transport, rather than having pre-meds watch some doc do something we cannot really help out with. Just my opinion.

Oh, and once, a patient offered me a $5 tip. I didn't take it, of course...:laugh:
 
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