Preceptorship

We have preceptorship about once every other week. A preceptor is a physician who volunteers his time to teach a medical student in something like an apprenticeship. It's pretty close to shadowing doctors as an undergrad, except you get a lot more freedom in what you can do. This acts as a precursor for third year clerkships to get us more comfortable and knowledgeable about the health care delivery setting. Our responsibilities include interviewing patients (taking the history), presenting the patient to the preceptor, and doing physical exams.

My preceptor is in Oakland. He is an internal medicine doctor, but the day of my preceptorship, he moonlights in a retirement facility. Our patients are older, often with complicated and chronic conditions. This makes the practice of medicine fascinating. My preceptor is very nice and has done this for several years. The first day, he had me interview two patients on my own. It was quite an experience. In theory, taking a history is not hard; there's a checklist of questions you want to ask and things you want to elicit. But in practice, it's very difficult keeping track of everything; patients obviously don't present things in order, prioritize things differently, and take divergent lines of thought. Even presenting the patients to the preceptor ("a 55 year old female enter with a chief complaint of...") takes practice. But I am sure in time I will become more familiar with it.