Spin Me Round

So it has been only three days since I started at Access Community Health Centers and I believe that my head has finally stopped spinning. These past few days have been a whirlwind tour of how to use EPIC (healthcare software), triaging phone calls, making medication refills and so much more. On Friday, I was talking to one of the nurses that I work with about how to learn all the information about services and programs; her advice...
"Learn as you go!" So in that spirit, here is a small glimpse of what I’ve been able to process so far!

1) Pharmaceutical Reps are your best friend and the people that will drive you crazy as well. On the one hand, pharmaceutical companies are wonderful because they give us samples of their brand name medications that we can give to patients for free. We give these samples when a patient can’t afford the med or if they are waiting for their prescription to come in through mail. There also is a Prescription Assistance Program (PAP) which allows people to get medication at a very large discount, which really helps when treating chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes and depression.
They will drive you crazy when they drop off samples and then tell you that this will be the last set of samples that we will be given. For example, this week we were given the last of the samples of Zoloft (an anti-depressant) because “Zolofts goin’ generic!” This now means that the patients who take this med will no longer be able to use samples, nor will they be able to get this medication through the PAP program. So, that means we will need to switch all of those patients to a new medication which creates a lot of work for the doctors and nurses. Also they will drive you crazy when their idea of a “sample supply” is one packet of an antibiotic, which wouldn’t even begin to treat any infection.

2) Any “simple, straight forward” phone call, will never stay that way. Inevitably any phone call you make that only involves one task on my end will turn into a million tasks or questions from the patient. Which is fine, but it’s good to have the mind set that the phone call is going to be more involved than you expect.

3) Patients will see you, the nurse, as the one who is supposed to know “everything” and will ask you any question. This means, that I have been “flying by the seat of my pants” and asking a lot of questions of my fellow nurses and providers. Which is awesome, but I realized instantly that I have a lot to learn and I probably will never have enough knowledge in my brain!


So this is just a smidgen of what I have been able to process in these past few days. And I am sure this week, and the many following this, will leave my head spinning and I will have much more learn!