From now on, I will post series of stories about clinical rotation I have to go through before becoming a full-fledged medical doctor. Just as the name implies, “clinical rotation” refers to process where medical interns are rotated to station on various clinical departments in teaching hospital. There are total of 14 stations here in Dr. Sardjito Hospital one has to endure all the way before claiming the title of “dr.” Here we call these departments as “stase”, obviously it comes from the word “station”, but I prefer the term “stage”, just like those “stage” from some side-scrolling shooter game like Megaman or Super Mario. And as you expect from stages in that kind of games which will be crawling with monster minions trying to get in your way, pits on terrain you have to jump over, and eventually a nasty boss that you have to defeat in order to proceed to the next stage; every stages in this clinical rotation will also exert such obstacles. And this is where the fun starts.
One of the "stage" in Super Mario 3. Look at that nasty pit! fall down and you're done for
March 23rd 2008, all medical students who completed their bachelor degrees and passed the “judisium day” were invited to an arranged reception ceremony at Dr. Sardjito Hospital. Early in the morning, we all dressed in attire we’ve been dreaming to wear ever since, the long sleeve white coat, with our name written on the green tag over the left chest and obviously a pair of all shiny dress shoe . The ceremony was opened by the dean and then followed by oat reading session which marked our first official day as medical intern. It turned out to be a long day with all those repetitive speech about “quality of care”, “customer satisfactory”, “superior service” and stuff (man, what is this? fresh salaryman orientation seminar?). It was already lunch time, but we got no clue whatsoever about where each of us are going to be assigned on the next day. What if we’re assigned to those infamous “killer stations” like pediatric, obstetric, or surgery department right on the first day? I’m sure a lot of us there in that conference room had hardly even prepare anything upon entering the rotation, perhaps none of us did, not even those among ones with highes GPA I believe . Fortunately, some of our friends, who weren’t too fond on sitting quitely as a good audience, finally by some way or another got their hand on the schedule of the clinical rotation. I didn’t know if it’s going to be good or bad news, but I’m sure my name written on the group which start the rotation from the station IKM…
Everyone looked so good on long sleeved white coat, even just for one day (after that we're only allowed to wear the short sleeved one). Good luck finding me on this picture.
IKM (Ilmu Kesehatan Masyarakat) or Public Health, last place I thought I was going to end up at. But I think this might be a good soft start into the infamous clinical rotation. The next day, we were to report at the IDepartement of IKM, which actually located at the campus building ground floor. It’s a shame, just as I imagined by then I was going to be encountering patients at the hospital, there I was, still sitting in the campus building lobby, not wearing even white coat (actually, it would be weird if I did). Surprisingly, that day wasn’t actually the first day. It was revealed by people in charge that the IKM would be starting next week. Ahh, looks like this isn’t going to be just a soft start, but a baby-butt-like very soft start. But I think it’s OK, the more holiday the better, so no complaints there (Unfortunately, later I found out that the holiday for the next 1,5 year of clinical rotation will be only 6 weeks, and this one week of pointless holiday cut away those remaining credit, damn!)
One week of holiday had passed, there we were again at the IKM Dept. After doing a seven question essay of preliminary test, we were divided into two groups of eight people and then dispatched to respective assigned areas. In a nutshell, the idea behind this IKM thing is to dispatch you to some region in town, do some research on public health issue that arise in the community there, and then make some scientific report out of it. Actually, it was not that complicated as it sounds, because after we could determine the topic of the research , we were then allowed to take reference or do some copy paste from previous reports made by our kind “predecessors”. My group decided to choose Chikungunya as the topic and there goes the research.
This research was actually done by simply asking community members to fill on a questionnaire. Unfortunately, we got no choice but deliver the questionnaires directly to EVERY houses on the block. And what make it worse was we had to repeatedly explain everything over and over, not to mention the “inspection on the environment” we had to do while at it (which actually involving taking a peek on people bathroom). When we retrieved the questionnaires on the next day, we finally decided to put our white coat on debut, because experience from the previous day taught us that some people just couldn’t help but wrongly accused us as motor cycle dealers (ahh, it must be because of those shiny dress shoe). But It turned out walking around the neighborhood in white coat was no less weirder (-_-’).
On to delvering questionnaires. You see, some of us did look like motor cycle dealers.
We have acquired all the data we need, now it’s time to make the report. Oh no, before that, we need to give the community some compensation in a form health promotion. We then arranged an evening gathering session in the village hall with help from local community leader. Despite all those clashing, flaming, and sulking behaviour among our team member while preparing the occasion, it turned out to be a successful and nicely done health promotion presentation, not to mention the good response we got from the community.
It took a whole week to make the report, again with all those clashing, flaming, and sulking (I was starting to think that one head working alone is way better than a few head working together). Now that the report all done, it’s time to take the exam! It was actually the strangest exam i ever take in my life, supposed that was really an exam in the first place. So in this so called exam, everyone of us was given ten piece of papers and one marker, each one with unique color. And then we are instructed to write on each paper, one issue that have to be addressed by a chief of incommunity health center (a.k.a Puskesmas). So there were ten issues for each examinees. The challenge was, none allowed to write the same issue that has been written by other fellow group member or otherwise the answer will be nullified. What’s so great about this test was we’re allowed to do group discussion and make sure none write a same issue twice. The task had to be completed within exactly one hour, and by then the answer papers were to be sticked over the white board in arranged fashion. Actually the marks came from the teamwork we displayed while doing the test. Well, I think that was a pretty innovative idea and I believe none would suffer a very bad mark since the evaluation was highly subjective and none actually dared to show some clashing, flaming, sulking, or egoistic behavior while doing the test. It’s surprising that the exam had actually nothing to do at all with all those activities we had done for the past two weeks, it didn’t even required us to study the night before.
Although, IKM isn’t really a “clinical” station, but that whole two weeks weren’t really that boring afterall. In fact I had learned a lot of things from it. Now that IKM is over, it’s time to proceed to the real deal: the hospital! It was only two long weeks of sitting around doing discussion and making report, but I started to forget that i am actually already a medical intern. It’s about time to wear some white coat and meet some real patients! So, Dr. Sardjito Hospital, here we come!
