Pediatrics

My last rotation as a third year medical student is pediatrics at the main UCSF teaching hospital. The rotation is divided into one week of primary care, two weeks of urgent care, one week of nursery, and two weeks of inpatient pediatrics. While it is meant to give us the breadth of the specialty, we sacrifice exploring each aspect in depth. Pediatrics is fun; children are really a unique population. Pediatric attendings, attuned to development, understand the medical student plight of being very early in our developmental stages. I don't remember pediatrics well, even though I had formal lectures on it a year ago in the Life Cycles block. I did get some pediatrics in family medicine, but that was ten months ago. So I'm going into this block with a little apprehension but expecting to play and learn a lot.

This rotation has less formal didactics than other rotations; we have one afternoon for laid-back case discussions. But we join the residents for morning report and noon conference, and most of the learning is on the job.