Small or Big?

My supervisor, Dr. McWilliams, is on vacation this week, so I’m on my own to fill the time.  Technically I could just leave town now and go home, but I still have questions to ask people and want to see how each doctor has their own style. I’ve seen some really interesting styles and hopefully I will remember a lot of them when it comes to doing patient exams in medical school.

Today I shadowed the head doctor of the Internal Medicine department.  She was just recently promoted to Major.  Being a major and the head of a department is unusual.  She is in the batch of doctors who are dissatisfied with her job, but nevertheless, she is an interesting person to talk to.  What I learned from our conversation is the differences of working at a small hospital like Bassett Army Community Hospital and working at a large hospital such as, Madigan Army Medical Center.  As always, there are pluses and minuses to working at either one.  At Bassett, you are limited to the amount of specialists you can refer people to, so as a doctor, you are forced to track and treat more on your own. If you are new out of residency, this allows you to step out of your comfort zone and hone all of your skills rather than focus on some chronic problems.  While this may sound nice for a life long learner, you also have more administrative tasks.

In a larger facility, you have more options, but are treated just as  doctor with lots of patients.  You don’t have to do extra administrative work such as, scheduling lectures for the hospital. But you may have to do on call at the hospital rather than home on call.

The most interesting part of our conversation is when she said:

If I were to go back, I would not join HPSP.  It is a 12 year commitment, and a lot of things can change in the 12 years.

This is coming from someone who met her husband at Bassett, has one kid with another on the way, and has not deployed.  I pointed out all these things to her and she recognized that this situation did produce a lot of good things, but she joined HPSP because of the medical school debt. I think if you are trying to avoid debt, joining the military solely for debt repayment is a wrong choice.

I’ve been emailing a pediatrics doctor in Santa Fe who did HPSP with Navy.  I meet him through hockey reffing this past season and we talked briefly about his time as a Navy Doctor.  I expressed my interest in HPSP and USUHS to him and we’ve kept in touch since then. When I get back to Santa Fe, I plan on meeting up with him to chat about life as a Navy doctor and see if there are any volunteer opportunities in the pediatrics department or if they have a NICU that I could help out in.

Right now I’m leaning more towards Navy over Army even though I’m shadowing Army doctors.  Navy has way better football uniforms. Navy also wins, I like winners.