LIFESTYLE: WEEKLY WORK SCHEDULE DEPARTMENT OF MEDICINE GHL || HOUSEMANSHIP

I love my job but it gets really crazy and tiring sometimes…..

How are we doing?
I’m back with another work related blog post and I hope y’all enjoy it like the last one. The feedback on that post was amazing. Didn’t know so many people would be interested in reading such and so many people encouraged me to do another. Incase you missed my first blog post about my Housemanship, then visit it so you can really understand this post.

I started with the DEPARTMENT OF MEDICINE, and this department has 5 units:
 Cardiology: A unit that specializes mainly with heart related conditions like Hypertension, Heart failure, etc.
Nephrology: A unit that specializes mainly with kidney related conditions like Chronic Kidney Disease, Acute kidney Injury, and can perform certain procedures like Dialysis, Kidney biopsy, etc
Dermatology: This unit deals with skin, nails and hair  related conditions like Atopic Dermatitis, Acne, etc. This happens to be my unit and its been wonderful so far.
Neurology: This unit deals with the disorders of the nervous system like Stroke, Seizures & Epilepsy, Dementia, etc
Endocrinology: This unit deals with the diseases of the endocrine system like Diabetes, Thyroid diseases, Tumors of the system, etc.
Being in the dermatology unit does not mean we take care of just skin disorders and same goes for other units. Every unit sees all the types of diseases and we manage all but the thing we do is that when we have diseases not related to our specialty, we write a consult to the unit that is known for that disease so they can review the patients involved and as the dermatology unit too, we get consults to review skin diseases. The best part about being in the dermatology unit is that we have a Skin clinic where we attend to patients and do skin procedures which I will talk about later. This means that by the end of my posting, I have an idea about general medicine and dermatology which is a plus for us compared to other units.

So, every unit goes on call every 5 days and call means you start work 8am a particular day and finish by 8am the next day. After that, if our call falls on a work day, it means we finish work 3-4pm the next day as we have to do our work that day. When we are on call, we attend to new cases, emergency cases, set lines for Intravenous fluids, take blood samples, etc. Sometimes, its fun and sometimes, it gets really stressful. Automatically, the patients we attend to during our call becomes our patients and if they end up getting admitted to the ward, its our responsibility to monitor them.
To start off with, as a house officer it is our responsibility to do a ward round on all your patients every morning to listen to patients complaints, check if the nurses are giving their medications and checking their vital signs
I work with two Doctors Dr Akwara who is a Principal Medical Officer and Dr Onaleye who is a Senior Medical Officer. They always supervise all our activities in the department.
Monday: On Mondays we work in the Medical Outpatient Department (MOPD) and the only thing we do is see patients who are for follow up. Most of these patients are known hypertensives and diabetics. So, we take their blood pressure, check their blood sugar level, weight, listen to their new complaints and finally, refill their drugs. On a typical Monday, we see at least 30 patients.

Tuesday: Our Principal Medical Officer checks all the patients we have in our unit. We go from one ward to the other. The main thing is to see how our patients are doing, if they are better, if their treatment treatment needs to be modified, and if they need to be discharged. We always have to document in the patient’s folders. The round can last for about 2/3 hours depending on the number of patients we have. He also uses this time to ask some medical questions and explain certain things. After this, we are done for the day so, we try to take blood samples for patients, fill investigation forms, write out drug prescriptions and set lines if necessary.

Wednesday: This day is just for the Skin clinic. We attend to new cases and follow up on the old cases both in children and adults. We see cases like Keloid which is the formation of a scar on the site of a healed skin injury, Inflammation of the skin disorders also known as Dermatitis, Genital and palmar Warts, Skin tags, Acne which is popularly known as pimples by most people in this part of the world, and lots of other skin related conditions you can think of. After listening to the patients complaints, examining and documenting for them, we write out medications their medications and some are booked for skin procedures just so we can confirm our diagnosis and manage the patients appropriately. A total of about 20-30 patents are seen. After that, at 1:00pm we go for Departmental Clinical Meeting where a unit presents a particular topic. Presentation is done by the house officers and Medical officers. Some pharmaceutical companies also come to tell us about their drugs and finally, we finish clinical meetings by asking questions and contributing if need be.

Thursday: I really love this day because I get to see skin procedures and also assist. The procedures we do are Skin biopsy which involves taking a part of the affected area of the skin to a laboratory, can be used to confirm a diagnosis which also aids adequate management. Another procedure is to give Intra lesional Kenalog injection and we mostly give this to patients with keloids which helps to soften and flatten the scar out. We also do Cryotherapy which involves using liquid Nitrogen to freeze out the tissue and this procedure is used for skin conditions like warts, skin tags, moles, etc. These are all the procedures we do on a regular basis.

Friday: The Senior Medical officer in my unit does his own ward round which is also similar to the Principal Medical Officer’s ward round on Tuesdays. After that, we are done for the day but if we are on call, we go to the emergency room and start attending to patients which means we work till 8am Saturday morning.
We come to work on Saturdays and Sundays even if we are not on call. Like I stated earlier, it’s compulsory to do ward rounds on the patients everyday as house officers. So, some of us come on Saturdays while some some on Sundays which depends if we are on call during the weekend or not.

I hope you were not bored reading. This is a really long blog post but glad I finally put it up. The next department will be SURGERY. Thanks for visiting and see y’all in my next blog post.