Surgeons: how many residents are usually on a certain patient with you?
I watch some medical shows and I was wondering if you could point out some inaccuracies. How many scrub nurses in an OR? When residents can begin to do "solo" surgeries without the supervision of an attending? How many patients a doctor might have at one time? Communication between doctors? Personal assistants? Floating to other professions like radiology or the ER? Are you usually consulted from the ER or are you searching for patients there like in Greys Anatomy? sorry for all the question. I am 16 and curious to medical professions. Thank you! that cleared a lot of things up for me!
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1 :
Medical shows are totally inaccurate. In a minor operation there would be one nurse assisting /passing instruments/ counting swabs and another as scout who gets equipment that may not be at hand. Scouts might roam between two minor OR/ OT in Australia. More nurses assist in major surgery OT. Residents in Australia are first year out of med school, so they would not be operating. In USA that probably/must be different. Doctors can have many patients - they work in a team - the consultant, a consultant trainee, a resident; so the work is shared according to level of skill. Consultants are called to ER or Radiology as need be on their consulting days. If they are not called they are doing rounds in the hospital visiting their inpatients or in the clinic seeing outpatients.
2 :
"How many scrub nurses in an OR" On nurse is scrubbed and assists the surgeon by passing instruments and other stuff. There is then one float nurse who answers the phone in the OR, gets supplies, and arranges the odds and ends needed for surgery. "When residents can begin to do "solo" surgeries without the supervision of an attending? " This is a unique thing, and for the vast majority of residents they are never allowed to perform surgeries without an attending surgeon present in the room. Some specialties, like neurosurgery and orthopedic surgery which have longer residencies, allow senior residents to do some limited operations without attending present if they are eligible to sit for the board certification exam. "How many patients a doctor might have at one time?" If you mean in the hospital, it all depends how busy their call nights are and how many operations they perform. Non-operative specialties like internal medicine, family practice, and pediatrics usually carry more patients than surgeons. That being said, the most the average surgeon would have in the hospital at an one time would probably be 10-15 (including consult patients) "Communication between doctors?" Doctors regularly consult one another on patients. This could be a surgeon asking an endocrinologist to mange a patients diabetes while they are in the hospital or an internal medicine doctor consulting a surgeon. It really all depends on the patients condition and the doctors ability to treat it. "Personal assistants" More and more doctors in all specialties are employing medical assistants and nurse practitioners to assist with patient care. "Floating to other professions like radiology or the ER?" For practicing doctors this almost never happens. For residents it is quite common. For example in many neurosurgery residencies, the residents are required to spend time in the radiology department studying neuroradiology and time in pathology studying neuropathology. "Are you usually consulted from the ER or are you searching for patients there like in Grey's Anatomy?" Almost all specialists share the same motto here: "STAY AWAY FROM THE ER, AND WHEN CALLED GET IN AND OUT!" Specialists almost never just hang in the ER, since whenever you do, the ER staff will ask you to see this patient for something or that one for something else before properly working them up themselves. This leads to the specialists spending extra time in the ER and wasting a lot of time on patients that they would not normally need ot see if the ER had done its job to start. So usually the specialists will wait to get called from the ER before going there.
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