Training Day

Today I got another reminder of why military interns/residents make more money than our civilian counterparts: training, or more specifically, training day. Not pleasant.

Since we have all sorts of mandatory training, about once a quarter, they put together a training day, providing multiple lectures for the in-person training we have to do, and lists of the electronic training. And for some reason, these always happen when I'm on in-patient wards or at Navy.

I started back on Ward 75 (aka, hell) on Monday, and my first day of call is tomorrow. Since we're the day pre-call, we have a pretty light census (we only admit on days when the team is on call), which I thought would translate into a little bit more sleep, but when I opened the email last night informing us of training day, I knew that wouldn't be the case. The first presentation was Alcohol and Substance Abuse Prevention (ASAP) at 0600--required annually, by fiscal years. Then I ran back up to the seventh floor from the second (that's more flights of stairs than it sounds; we have half-floors, but that's another story for another time), to get vitals and lab results on my patients and start rounding. Then at 0900 was Equal Opportunity/Prevention of Sexual Harassment (EO/POSH) (required quarterly, for some stupid reason) back on the second floor, and then back up to the seventh to write my notes and try to get work done. And then 1000 was Patient Safety (annually, and pretty much just consists of people talking about what kinds of mistakes interns make when writing orders), then back up to Ward 75 to finish work and prepare to sign out to the on-call team. There was also Warrior Proficiency Tasks (or something along those lines), which is required annually for everyone captain and below, from 1300-1700, but I skipped that. It's cold and raining, and I wasn't in the mood to practice dissembling/reassembling weapons or practicing litter carries or any of that. They'll tag me for that later in the year, I'm sure, even though I just did all of that at C4.

I also spent a good deal of time in the last couple of days doing online training to prepare to go to Peru for my research rotation in February. I've done Antiterrorism and Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE), neither of which can really be taught online, realistically. Really, do they think answering a few questions about being held captive is going to help if it happens (especially since medical personnel can't technically be held captive, according to the Geneva Conventions)? Government efficiency, I guess.

And tomorrow, the first of five calls for the month...