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Second Week in Whiteriver

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  My second week I worked in the ER. The ER is a fun experience here. I do enjoy working in the ER due to the undifferentiated nature of the patients that show up. I worked about half of my time with ER residency trained physicians and about half my time with Family Medicine trained doctors. Both of the attendings were good teachers. Fortunately I got to work with one family medicine attending for the majority of the week and one ED doc for the majority of the week, so I got to build relationships with both of them. The ER in Whiteriver is a busy, high acuity ER. During the day, there are 4 providers working (2 on the fast track side, and 2 seeing the higher acuity ER patients). The 20 beds are often mostly full. They see 36,000 pts a year which turns out to be 100/day. It was cool to see family doctors working down in the ED alongside ED trained doctors, and they have a good relationship. The first night, the computers went down in the middle of a busy afternoon, so everyone h...
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First Week in Whiteriver!

  It has been an interesting week in Whiteriver, AZ so far.  I arrived to Whiteriver on Sunday, May 2. The terrain surprised me; I was expecting desert, but I drove through forests full of pine trees on my way to Whiteriver. They are putting me up in the "male locums house" which is a small pre-fab house on the compound by the hospital. There is a town of 4,000 down the road 10 minutes from the hospital which has a basic grocery store, a Burger King, a post office, and a single stop light. The hospital serves the entire Fort Apache reservation, which occupies 1.6million acres of land in SE Arizona and has a population of around 13,000. After going through an exhausting 9 hour orientation to the hospital and its computer systems on my first day, I started working on the "wards." The wards is mainly inpatient medicine with a little OB mixed in. They had a fairly small census for most of the week, around 8-10 patients. They had two family doctors running the service,...
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