This morning CPT Lee (internal medicine intern on a preventive medicine rotation) and I were educated as to the work of a preventive medicine doc by MAJ Soltis. We learned about medical threat briefs, outbreak investigation, redeployment medical briefs, and what PM docs do when deployed. She was in Afghanistan in 2006 with the 10th Mountain Division, so she gave us a little presentation about what that was like. She was the only PM doc in all of Afghanistan, so a lot of things fell to her. She was in charge of the influenza vaccination program in country (everyone in the military must get a flu shot every year, even while deployed); that year, 82.5% of soldiers in Afghanistan got a flu shot (that's a very high number, by the way). She also made recommendations regarding malaria prophylaxis, including changing medications when necessary; did weekly casualty briefs; gave redeployment briefs three times every week for a year; and was the go-to person for possible outbreak investigation and immunization needs. It actually sounded like a lot of fun.
Anyway, after that, CPT Lee and I were sent to WRAMC to look up the patients in our "outbreak" and get all their in-patient data, which you can only do on-site (outpatient data is on AHLTA and can be accessed on any computer in the world with AHLTA access). That ended up taking longer than we thought, and we didn't get out of there until about 6:00, by far my latest night on this rotation to date. I'm hoping we got all the relevant data we needed, and we don't have to go back. It took us about 45 minutes to get to the hospital, even though WRAMC is only about a mile from WRAIR (we found out later that President Bush was visiting, which always does funny things to traffic and security).
Tomorrow, our education on PM continues, as LTC Cavicchia (another OSU alum, by the way), the Chief of Epidemiology and Disease Control at WRAIR, tells us about her job.
No comments:
Post a Comment