 | Great cases. The Altoona Hospital serves
as both a local hospital that provides us with cases of common inpatient
medical problems, and as a regional referral center which provides us the
opportunity to see an occasional "zebra". |
| Autonomy. This is the rotation where the
residents call the shots, they make the clinical decisions, and either stand
or fall based on their decisions. (But don't worry there isn't too much
falling because of attending oversight.) |
| Great attendings.
The in-patient family
medicine service is supervised exclusively by Altoona Family Physicians
Residency Faculty, which means you don't have to call all over town to
multiple private physician offices looking for attending oversight. |
| No scut. The Altoona Hospital is fully
staffed with IV teams, phlebotomy teams, and EKG teams, meaning very rarely
do residents have to be bothered with these types of problems (particularly
in the middle of the night.) |
| Opportunity to do procedures. While you
do not have to worry about niggling minor procedures such as IV and blood
draws, plenty of opportunity does exist for other frequent inpatient
procedures, such as lumbar punctures, central venous line placement,
paracentesis, thoracentesis, etc. |
| Way cool new wireless hand-held computers.
All the residents on the inpatient service have been provided with new iPAQ
or Dell computers.
These are very cool and download all patient information via wireless
internet access throughout the hospital and the family practice
center. There are also a few games on this PDA, but unfortunately no
MP3 player. |
