COAMS #42 - Family Medicine

I noticed I left out a blog entry during my family medicine posting… i should acknowledge it here because it has indeed been a fairly important 2 months of my life… I mean, I had a non-hospital setting rotations for 8 weeks! Half day work, afternoon naps on weekdays, even off on Wednesdays!! Wow! How cool is that! Not to forget, I also had one of the worse days of my life- down with Dengue Fever, but I’ll come to that later…

I learnt a couple of important things during family medicine… I finally got to witness the long queues, long waiting hours, insufficient number of medical staffs.. There’s like a doctor to 60+ patients per day… and they were seeing each patient for an average of 5 minutes at the health clinic (klinik kesihatan).. despite the whole holistic lectures.. p/s: 5mins is a very short time…

The fun part of family medicine, you get to participate more in clinic activities.. You get to see patients, clerk them, examine them and even manage them… Yes, you get to prescribe medications!! Under the supervision of an attending doctor or medical attendant, of course, who counter checks the medications, but still, it’s pretty cool,… though most patients complains of simple problems like URTI, conjunctivitis, muscle sprains, allergic eczema, etc…

The crammy place at PPP, the nasi ayam at KK Batu 9, sunflowers at KK Batu 14… who would ever forget? ^^

p/sss: after rereading the above post, i realized it sounded like the writings of a primary school kid... i guess we can't fake enthusiasm, can we?

(Written on May 08, 2008 at 10:03 PM)