Use your brain. Please.

I’ve quickly realized that the clinic where I work is the type of place where all roads lead to the doctor. In other words, nearly every problem and nearly every question gets turfed to me.

That would be great …

• If we weren’t a high volume super crazy busy clinic where I need to see 25-30 patients per day (for perspective that’s about double the number of patients that my classmates in other clinics see per day)
• If we didn’t have a practice manager to deal with issues (example: payroll questions ARE NOT MY PROBLEM)
• If I had several years’ (or even a year’s) worth of experience to draw back on
• If all of these problems and questions actually waited until my blocked (no appointment) hour for me to deal with instead of interrupting me about every 5 minutes (no joke)

It is ridiculously hard for me to get anything done when I am interrupted so often. I literally have 2-3 techs working on 2-3 different patients simultaneously (example – a dental, a drop-off annual exam, and an appointment), plus 1-2 receptionists fielding phone calls and front desk queries, plus the practice manager popping in with questions. It has gotten to the point that I’ve come home and cried a couple times this week. I’m scared that I will make a HUGE mistake due to this broken process. Here's an example of a smaller mistake: I under-dosed an antihistamine for an itchy patient because I looked at the weight in kilograms and not in pounds; I was ordering up the meds with 2 different people talking at me at once about other things.

At my training hospital it was not like this. The receptionists didn’t come to the back asking for help with every phone call not involving appointment scheduling. The techs didn’t ask me for my opinions about stupid stuff like whether or not I want to give dewormer or to wait 2 weeks until it is "officially" due in an adult (i.e. probably doesn't even need the damn dewormer) dog – WHO CARES? The practice manager was the go-to person for questions about company policy, payroll, and so on.

What makes it worse is that the practice manager keeps going on and on and on about how they’re so happy that Dr. X and me are “here to stay” for “at least a couple of years.” If things don’t change soon I may not make it to the 1 year mark. Or the 6 month mark.

Ugh. I know that I’m going to have to put my foot down about all this crap. Here’s hoping I can do it without losing my metaphorical, um, poop.