Now that brings up an interesting idea. Would paramedic clinicals be better if paramedics acted more like medical students and low level residents and instead of following a nurse or physician around, after an orientation period saw patients by themselves, presented the patient to an attending physician with a plan, wrote the the orders, and had the physician cosign the order?
One of our clinicals that we we had to do was a shift shadowing one of the ER docs. The day I was doing it, the medical director was there for the last half of my shift, and I probably learned more in that 6 hours about being confident in your decisions than I did the entire rest of medic class.
When he got a new patient, after he evaluated them, he would send me in to do my own patient interview/assessment. After doing that, he would ask me what I thought was going on with the patient, what I wanted to do, and why I wanted to do it. We would then talk about my decisions and how I arrived at them.
Sometimes, I was dead on what he was planning on doing for the patient, other times, I would miss the mark a bit. However, I still made decisions that were not detrimental to my patient. It was just my inexperience showing.
Towards the end of the shift, he told me that if I got nothing else out of the experience, he wanted me to walk away with the idea that no matter what you decide to do, stand by your decision. There is nothing that says if it doesn't work, you can't reassess the situation and reach a new conclusion. Just have confidence in yourself, you really do know this stuff.
Overall, it was one of the best clinicals I had the entire time I was in class.
