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I had an admissions duty day last week with a few of my classmates. We basically helped a junior student, also on admissions duty, admit a new patient into the school. Here is how it went:
We showed up on time, signed our name for attendance, and received a 100 page packet on the admissions clinic. We get a packet like this from almost all the clinics totaling about 1,000 pages, or so it seems (about 9 different clinics each with their own packet). I don’t know when we are expected to read all of these packets considering we are getting ready for the boards on top of some random quizzes and tests. They do seem like helpful resources if you can sift through all the filler material.
After we got our packet we started to help out the upperclassman. I must say it is a little nerve wracking. Some good advice I have been given is to be confident even though sometimes you have no idea what you are doing. I was asked to check the blood pressure of the new patient. After fumbling through a small some small brain farts of putting the blood pressure cuff on upside down and not being able to inflate the arm cuff (screw in the valve idiot!) I was able to get the blood pressure. Phew! Some of these things (taking blood pressure, etc.) we haven’t done for a year, and after 40 credits of various classes these things get put into a brain .zip file and are compressed for later use.
The patient obviously fills out a new patient medical history form and this is all reviewed with them. Everything from allergies to hospitalizations and medications. An extraoral examination is performed followed by an intraoral examination in which gross defects are noted in the chart. After everything is reviewed by the student and checked over and written down, the student finds a faculty member and presents the case.
You give the patients age, sex, blood pressure, chief complaint, and a few other things like medications, findings from the exam, and medical history. The faculty member may then quiz you on various things that they find are suitable for you to learn. We weren’t really quizzed for our session, but we did learn some things. Our instructor gave a very good example of a head and neck exam, we auscultated the TMJ, which really isn’t necessary, but it was cool to hear clicking in the left TMJ and nothing in the right. This clicking did not bother the patient by the way and is actually quite common. Then we got to perform the intraoral examination ourselves. This poor patient had about 12 fingers in her mouth back to back for about 40 minutes. The patient was, well, patient and had no problem helping us out.
After we were done we took the patient to radiology and handed their chart over for xrays. That concluded our session. The patient will then be assigned a student over the next two weeks who will take care of their needs.