If It's June, It Must Be ... Intern Week!

Well, it's that time of year again.

As June 21 looms ahead of us this week, the new interns are now here.

They arrived on campus last week for a full schedule of orientation sessions, getting-to-know-you and team-building activities, lectures on multiple different systems that they will need to log into -- all the stuff necessary to get them started on the right foot. We've all been there.

This Wednesday they will show up on their first rotations, whether that's the inpatient medicine wards, our outpatient practice, the ICU or CCU, or the emergency department. The schedule also includes vacation time as one of the rotations. I remember when I was an intern, one of my co-interns started out with vacation, which is the worst time to have it because you are really geared up to start working, plus it means you'll have a long stretch later with no time off.

This year we met with the new interns in a large room over at the hospital faculty club, introducing them to the world of outpatient medicine, letting them know what's coming, trying to inspire them to the model of taking care of people not lying down in a hospital bed, but going through their daily lives trying to get and stay as healthy as they can.

One of the best parts of outpatient medicine is that most every patient goes home immediately after their visit with you. They get to sleep in their own bed that night, and so do you. And I always remind the interns that no matter what specialty or subspecialty they choose -- unless they are going to be an intensivist or a hospitalist -- they will undoubtedly have outpatient office time, with the tools and lessons they learn in our ambulatory practice hopefully holding them in good stead.

We recognize that they are entering this phase of their training during an incredibly challenging time in healthcare, just after a terrible pandemic, while its effects on our society still linger, as do the implications of what it revealed in terms of social injustice and healthcare inequities.

The expectations and the chaos in the bureaucratic systems they will be operating in are an unfair burden to put onto people, no matter what stage of their training, and as I've mentioned before, it's really hard to inspire people to choose this life when it feels like a dumping ground rather than the extraordinary opportunity that it is.

Those of us at academic faculty practices across the country are poised now to set off on this part of our jobs, with the hope of inspiring this generation of interns and residents once again to choose to become somebody's doctor.

We are planning to demonstrate, teach, and mentor, to model good behaviors and the value of diagnostic skills and talking to patients. Sure, there will be lots of pointless forms to fill out, frustrating bureaucratic nonsense with insurance companies and others, and systems that exist only because "that's the way it has always been done." I can only hope that we can show them all that change is coming, that innovation and quality can go hand in hand, and that if we raise our voices loud enough and never stop, then eventually someone will have to listen.

In this column in the weeks and months ahead, I hope to continue to highlight the places we can do better, the ways we can get those making healthcare decisions to agree that a solid foundation of primary care, outpatient medicine, prevention, and coordinated collaborative care are the keys to taking great care of individuals, communities, and society as a whole.

I'm hoping we can encourage a few, if not all, to think about this as they move along their career trajectories. I'm hoping we can inspire another generation of clinician educators, teachers, mentors, and researchers -- and old-fashioned primary care doctors -- to fight the good fight.

I hope you'll continue to join me as we do everything we can to bring them along on this wild, crazy, wonderful ride.

Comment