Today, we were at a different location. Claudia and I were shadowing Dr. McElveen at the Carolina Ear and Hearing Clinic. Dr. McElveen is specialized in ENT (ear, nose, and throat). This was a completely different experience because not only does Dr. McElveen have a different specialty, but he also doesn’t work at the hospital unless its doing surgery. Today, we worked at his office where we met with patients all day. We arrived at 9am and worked until 4:30pm with an hour long lunch break at around 1. We did a mix of seeing patients with Dr. McElveen and seeing patients with his nurse. In the afternoon, he allowed Claudia and I to meet with two new patients of the clinic by ourselves. We were allowed to fill out their chart and ask them questions just getting as much information about why they’ve come to see Dr. McElveen. We then ran over everything with the nurse to make sure we had filled it out correctly, then presented like residence would to Dr. McElveen before he went in to see the patient. I don’t think ENT is something that I am very interested in, but I did enjoy seeing a completely different aspect of medicine. Another difference in Dr. McElveen’s practice and the hospital, was that Dr. McElveen still had patient files, like the one below, whereas the hospital had all its records on the computer.
