I have been trying to figure out how to juggle working full time, doing clinicals, trying to spend time with my husband. He’s feeling very neglected and he’s right. I don’t know how people do this every day. I keep counting the days (haven’t gotten exact number yet because I’m too lazy to count that far) until graduation.
I need a vacation to the mountains again soon. Unfortunately, when I get a couple of weeks between semester, the kids go back to school! So the plan now is to bank up my PTO hours and take a month off after I graduate. Sweet bliss it will be, if I can work it out.
Lots of people at work keep asking me what I will do whenever I graduate. I’m not even sure myself. I’m using clinicals to test out potential employers. I have had a great experience so far with a female doctor who started out as a nurse. I firmly believe that all doctors should be nurses first so they can see what we see on a daily basis. The office that she has is also listed as a rural facility so I could possibly get some of my loans paid back by the government. I will be looking at a few more potential prospects in the next two semesters.
So, what does one do to fix grad school burnout? Well.. Some things that I’m doing are sitting here typing this post, watching “The Quiet Man” with my husband, and later on… Fireworks of the personal kind…
As always, thanks for the continued support that I’ve been receiving from my loyal readers toward paying for school expenses!
“The demand for doctors is growing and the supply isn’t keeping up. Hospitals
have found a solution to the problem by hiring nurse practitioners and physician
assistants — midlevel practitioners who serve to augment physicians in
practices and hospitals”, says Jerry Siebenmark. “
“While most NPs and PAs work as employees of private practice physicians, hospital executives and health care administrators say they expect their use within hospitals to continue to increase. That’s because hospitals will be dealing with a growing population of older and sicker patients at the same time shortages of physicians across the country emerge.”
Dr. Joe Davison, a Wichita family practitioner and president of the Kansas Academy of Family Physicians, says midlevel practitioners are an effective extension of the physician.
Hospitals will rely more and more on PAs and NAs as the country wrestles with a physician shortage that, according to the Council on Graduate Medical Education, will peak by 2020, with a deficit of 96,000 physicians. “They absolutely are and they will play a key role in all types of health
care, city and rural,” Davison says. But, he says, they are no substitute for physicians who have more training and education. “This job of taking care of people with illness is so difficult, you cannot get enough training, even doctors,” Davison says. “It’s just such a large body of information, it’s so unpredictable and there are so many variables. There has to be a team approach, an understanding of duties and responsibilities.”
NPs and PAs are being used in hospital settings to cover the shortage of medical providers. In my facility the ER Fast track is run by NPs who collaborate with the MD working in the regular ER at the time. This helps keep the ER from being overrun by common everyday complaints and let’s the truly emergent cases be seen by the physicians much faster. This is a win-win situation for everybody with less waiting time in the waiting rooms and less stress on the regular ER staff.
The concept of a hospitalist NP will be a new one in my facility but I hope it will be implemented soon. More and more of the physicians that I work with are recognizing the merits of a collaborating NP on board both in the office and the hospital.
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