I'm entering my senior year of undergrad and have decided to take time off before applying to med school. I'm considering applying to be an ED medical scribe, so I was wondering, what was your experience like scribing? Thank you!
I really enjoyed my scribing experience in the ED! I am so glad I did it. I’m sure @ermedicine and @medschoolmanic can attest to how awesome it is as well. I am pretty sure I don’t want to do emergency medicine with my life after scribing but it still was a very valuable experience (for ermedicine and medschoolmanic, I think it made them both more interested in it!). For me, I learned that I want some continuity with the patients I see and don’t want to only see them once (and if you see a patient more than once in the emergency department it’s definitely not a good thing).
I learned a ton of different things (that now later on make more sense in context). For instance, we saw somebody one time with Bell’s palsy (his left side of his face was drooping compared to his right) and I remember my doc telling me that it was due to a problem with his cranial nerve VII. I had no idea what any of the cranial nerves were (never took any neuro classes in college) but when I learned them in med school I remembered that patient. It’s easier to learn something if you’ve seen it before (even without a lot of context).
I was exposed to a lot of medical terminology which has made it a bit easier in med school since some professors forget that students haven’t learned some of the terms yet and use them anyway. I got a good feel for how an ED operates and all the different team members that are involved. I got to see a ton of patients with my docs and learn a little bit about all the different workups. I am now decent at using an electronic medical record (where I scribed we used Epic). I never knew what was going to happen every time I got to work. It was very fast paced and it was a bit of adjustment to start (I always felt behind) but it was the best feeling once I got comfortable with what I needed to do. It also further cemented my goal to become a physician.
I wrote a bit more about my experience here: http://texanmdtobe.tumblr.com/post/113391688459/what-i-have-learned-from-scribing-in-the-emergency
Also yay for gap year(s)!!! Best of luck to you and let me know if you have any more questions :)