Thursday, January 15, 2009

Those Uppity Students!

The chairman of my department got a phone call from the hospital medical director a few months ago. "One of your anaesthetists said it was a good thing one of the medical students was going into family medicine because she is stupid", said the medical director, "I am a family doctor and I really resent that." The chairman investigated this of course and on talking to the anaesthesiologist involved a different story emerged.

This anaesethesiologist who is a really nice guy was preceptored with a student intern for a week as is the practice at our hospital. The student wanted to go into family medicine and told him so. One day after she missed several IVs, he said jokingly, "boy it's good thing you are going into family medicine." (As an aside, I did general practice which was what we called family medicine back then and in rural settings, my ability to start an IV saved my butt more than a few times.) She however didn't take this comment well, complained to the appropriate persons and it ended up on our chairman's lap.

I really hate the term politically correct however the only way to describe our chairman is as someone who is not politcally correct.

And so it happened that a few days later he was doing the plastics list. A student was scrubbed in with the plastic surgeon and was being pretty quiet. For some reason he thought this was a good time to tell this story. Which he did in his loud politically incorrect way.

A few days later he gets a phone from the University Chairman of Anaesthesiology at the CofE. It seems that the rather quiet student intern scrubbed during the plastics case was the same student intern with the problem starting IVs. Says the CofE chair, " I have just gotten off the phone with the assistant Dean in charge of equity." The jist of the whole conversation was that he would like an apology to the student from our chair. Our chair basically said, there is no way I am apologizing for this and that fortunately is how things ended.

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