Call Week: Here We Go!
“I handed you a mess.” — my colleague texted me this as she signed over the longest list of patients I’ve ever seen (to be fair, I never counted, but it definitely looked longer than anything I can remember in the 12 years since I’ve been working here!).
To clarify: she actually did NOT hand me a mess. This colleague would never, she is very thorough and extremely hard working and her signout was first rate, organized and complete. So I reassured her of that! There are just a lot of patients with our involvement.
I resisted the urge to panic (mostly) and once I got to the office I printed things out and went to town with my highlighters in triage fashion: yellow = need to see now; orange = need to swing by today or tomorrow; blue = hanging out on the list, but nothing is pressing. Then I created a shorter list of just the yellows + oranges. Ahhhh, much better.
(For those unaware, pediatric endocrinologists do work in the hospital sometimes, but mainly as consultants. We may have a few patients on our own team — mostly kids newly diagnosed with diabetes — but the bigger slice of our inpatient work is with patients on other teams, like the neonatal intensive care unit, the cardiac unit, the pediatric ICU, and regular ‘floor’ patients admitted to general pediatrics. At some institutions, peds endos actually don’t admit anyone directly — they only consult. Many of the “blue” patients were patients we are consulting on, but we might only be managing, say, thyroid and therefore involvement is sporadic, generally when labs result.)
ANYWAY. Color coding for the win! It took me well over an hour to conduct a thorough triage of every patient on the list (I created tentative plans for the active patients while I went through, so it was lengthy process). I was able to keep things organized and it really wasn’t quite as chaotic as it looked on the outset.
Hopefully I can get through my week like this:
One task at a time
Do what is essential
Care for myself in the most basic of ways (decent food not just Sbux; do not attempt to get up early if there has been badly interrupted sleep; lean on others for help with the kids this week; etc)
Choose to keep things quiet when possible (ie: do not flood my brain with frenetic distracting inputs, it only backfires)
Find little things to appreciate during each day — there may be tough moments but there are still bright ones too!
Yes, this is my own pep talk (and one I’ve written many times before).
PS: This is one of those uninterrupted call weeks, so I’ll be on until next Monday at ~7 AM.
PPS: My Toggl time tracking is still going, will be interesting to see what that looks like this week!
8 Comments
Good luck! I won’t use the “q” word, but I hope you have a smooth call week.
good luck! one bite at a time, and the elephant will be off your plate by Monday…
You can do this! What a great idea to triage + color code.
Helpful to read when I am also in the midst of a busier-than-usual work week. Will give the color coding a try, as well as the pep talk. Good luck this week!
Love the colour coding hack (I do this, too, sometimes for various things)!
Hope it’s a smooth week on call!!!
Good luck! This sounds like a tough week, but you’ve got a great attitude, and you will get through it!
What does being on call actually mean? Is it that you have to be available 24/7?
yes. Generally this means regular hours in the hospital during the days (weekdays – full days; weekend days – can be there for short time or whole day depending on what is going on) and also available for phone/order entry-type stuff overnight for 7 days.