Week Three at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital

Finally, after having labored for three weeks and two weekends, my power point presentation on lung neoplasms is complete. It's quite a task to make a presentation designed to last only 30 minutes when there are so many things to be talked about. The only thing left for this is to remember what to say when the presentation day actually comes.

The biggest thing that I'm looking forward to right now is my interview on Monday. I'm reading up on some of the many questions that they may ask me, but it always seems that no matter how much you prepare there is always one curve ball of a question which comes your way. Even though our monthly test and my presentation is just four days after this interview I can't think about anything else at the moment.

So far being in the gross room at UPMC Presbyterian has been another big learning experience. It seems almost like a polar opposite of grossing at Charleston. Since we are once again using CoPath to make our dictations, the pace of grossing specimens has dramatically decreased. But, that is because of all of the attention to detail and procedures that must be followed. The grossing system at UPMC Presbyterian introduces a whole new set of minute issues to deal with as opposed to just speaking into a microphone. Some of the things which come to my mind are...
- writing our name in the 'grossed by' field
- using dictation templates for a whole variety of specimens
- being super careful to make sure your dictation is absolutely correct
- taking photographs of a wide variety of specimens from small to big (and excellent quality photos at that)
- ordering cassettes and waiting for them to print (at Charleston they are hand-written)
- writing the patient's name on the side of the cassette as well as any special notes for histology (decal, on-edge, etc...)
- being super careful to make sure your dictation is absolutely correct
- recording the amount of time that the specimen has spent in formalin
- providing the clinical history of the patient (at other places the transcriptionists may handle this for you)
- correcting spelling and punctuation mistakes made by Voiceover or yourself
- for gross-only specimens, being able to use the correct templates to insert the correct final diagnosis
- being super careful to make sure your dictation is absolutely correct
- for specimens in which frozen section has been performed, to know the right format and structure to report the findings
- for specimens that need to be sent to other labs for further studies, know which special forms to fill out or log book to record it in
- have a PA proofread your dictation to make sure everything is correct
and of course, it's important to not forget...
- being super careful to make sure your dictation is absolutely correct
I'm fairly good at making an easy to read and easy to understand dictation which includes all of the information that you will need to know. But, when all of the above little things are thrown into the mix my pace goes way down again. There are a lot of good things about this system however. It has really given me the time to reflect on how I word my dictations so that I understand the specimen in-depth. At some of the other places, you may be doing specimens so quickly that little thought goes into the disease process or techniques involved in cutting the specimen. Also, because a lot of the specimens involve taking photographs, it has given me an excellent source of example specimen templates and their associated pictures for my own personal use. It's very satisfying to open up a word document of a previous case that you've done and read your dictation and correlate that with the picture. It brings back a kind of nostalgia and you can think to yourself "What a job well done."

There are always going to be a lot of new things to get used to when moving to a new lab. I will worry more about my interview first, then focus on getting into the flow of the lab.

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