Having taken a blow from ye-olde-merry-virus season, I am laid up, febrile and coughing and achy and bored.  My eyes can’t focus long enough to do anything significant, so I decided to organize the ever-growing stack of journals, random articles, and old sign-outs on my desk.  I came across this great article about how hospitalists spend their time.

Hospitalist fun facts from this article: 18% of their time is spent on direct patient care, meaning speaking directly to patients and their families and examining them, whereas 69% of their time is spent on indirect patient care, meaning charting, orders, speaking to other involved medical team members about the patient’s care, yadda yadda.

I think it would be interesting to see how it breaks down for residents.  As an intern, I have really intensely colored memories of working with patients and their families, all topped on a hum-drum backdrop of indirect patient care, i.e. scut…so maybe it was half n’ half?  As a senior resident, I think I spend even less time with patients and more time on paperwork, working with other staff / physicians to advance patient care, more paperwork…a lot of clicking and typing and staring at a computer screen and having arguments with the computer order entry system, the computer medicine reconciliation list, and other computerized computery things that make me go nuts.

Also, I’m a terrible Pubmed searcher, so while there are multiple articles popping up on resident work hours rules and its effects on how residents spend their time, I can’t seem to find anything specific to year of training and it’s correlation to amount of time involved in direct patient care. 

This begs the second question, does more face time with patients make you a better doctor?  I can certainly say that qualitatively, the brief interactions I have with patients and families feels somehow better, even if the minutes are fewer.

This is tiring me. Thinking too much about one subject while my arms and tummy and knees and hair follicles hurt is really really exhausting.