Internship Goals

[explenture]

Beginnign 1 April I have a 250 hour internship to conclude my Paramedic program. What I am trying to do is set a few goals for myself. For instance I need to improve my IV skills. Or we've yet to do 12 leads so I want to learn that and apply it as much as I can.

What I'm looking for is some other goals be they concrete or abstract I could use to get the most of this 250 hours. For those with lots of street time what would your goals be if you could go back and do an internship? For more recent students how did you use such time?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[mediccjh]

Pick the brains of your preceptors. Your brain should become a sponge.

Treat your patients not because you need the skills, but because the patient needs them.

Go in as if you know nothing, ie, don't tell war stories or brag. Preceptors look at this as fresh meat and will jump on you if you fail.

[Dustdevil]

Good advice from CJ, as usual.

As you should have been doing throughout school up to this point, focus on the headwork, not the skills. The skills are easy. The hard part -- which a great number of medics never master -- is assessment and diagnosis of your patient and his/her problem. Don't count on a mere 250 hours getting you there, especially if you don't have the educational foundation that a quality programme provides, but it will certainly go a long way towards helping you to function professionally.

Again, forget about skills. If you need them, you'll use them, and you'll get better with each patient. But this is not a "goal" you can or should set. It is simply natural progression that results from practice. If you focus on skills during your Internship, you will be shorting yourself and your patients. Way too many medics do this, and it shows. You can't approach your patients with the sole intent of figuring out what skills you can (as opposed to "should") use on them. Your primary focus should be a complete and comprehensive diagnostic evaluation of their condition to determine what their problem is. Then you identify what specific problems result from this condition. Then you identify why those problems exist physiologically. Then you identify what interventions you might perform which would improve these conditions.

There is only one skill in your repertoire that should be constantly in the forefront of your mind and priorities, and that is assessment. Everything else is a distant second at best.