Baystate Pride

Time for a major update. I have MOVED to Springfield, Massachusetts for my third year of medical school.

So what is third year? Honestly, until it started I wasn't so sure myself. I've heard a lot of rumors about what it is like, and have seen former third year students wandering around hospitals like zombies in white coats. When I moved into my beautiful and humungous apartment in Chicopee with my new and awesome roommates, Nicole and Falafel (the cat, not the food), I got a peek of what third year might be like. The guy who lived here before us just finished third year. When we moved in he pulled a dusty dry erase board with a message for us down and smacked it onto the front of our fridge. He told us it was a message he got from the third years who lived here before he did, and that he felt the same way and saved the board for us. I hope that this wont be "the worst year of our lives," but just in case, we changed the dry erase board to something a bit more positive.

Yep, third year is supposedly "challenging." We rotate through 2-4 electives and 6 core clerkships of Family Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology (OB/GYN), Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Surgery. Depending on the rotation, we work between 40 and at maximum 80 hours a week with doctors caring for patients, and then go home and do homework and read about everything we treated. We are expected to know everything, and to speed up health care. In reality, we know close to nothing and slow everyone down (or at least that is how I feel a lot of the time).

Luckily for us, Tufts had their first ever Orientation for third year this year, to make us feel just a little bit more prepared. We practiced placing catheters, drawing blood, suturing (photo of some of my first stitches - other than the ones I did on the Thanksgiving turkey this year...), and went over how to communicate with busy doctors. They like to call this communication style "presenting," and it involves using as many big jargony medical terms as possible in the shortest amount of time needed to convey the most important information about a patient to their doctor.

I. Love. Baystate. Ok, it may be really early, and I may not exactly be rotating INSIDE the hospital, but I love the mission (to improve the health of the people in our communities every day, with quality and compassion), the culture, the people, the ambiance, the je ne sais quoi. I just love it.

Lets talk Baystate. Baystate has won too many awards for me to keep track of, but if you want to see them (Mom, this is for you), dig into the Baystate Trophy Closet. I found the picture to the left in a Consumer Reports magazine - Leapfrog rated Baystate in the Top 10 teaching hospitals based on five key safety and quality metrics (readmission rates, complications, communication, CT scan overuse, and infections). TOP TEN!

Of equal importance to me (AKA a medical / public health student, not a patient) is that the doctors and educators and medical teams love having students here. They love to teach, and they take pride in the quality care they provide to their patients and the quality education that they provide to us. And that pride is clearly contageous.