{"id":30483,"date":"2012-07-18T15:02:44","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T19:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/?post_type=voices&p=30483"},"modified":"2012-07-18T15:02:44","modified_gmt":"2012-07-18T19:02:44","slug":"lessons-from-ekg-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/2012\/07\/18\/lessons-from-ekg-class\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons from EKG Class"},"content":{"rendered":"

CardioExchange welcomes this guest post from\u00a0Dr. Westby Fisher, an electrophysiologist practicing at\u00a0NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, Illinois, and a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago\u2019s Pritzker School of Medicine.\u00a0This piece originally appeared on his blog,\u00a0Dr. Wes<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>“Dr. Fisher, can you teach our residents’ EKG lecture series?”<\/p>\n

Naively, I said “Sure!”<\/p>\n

What I didn’t realize is how hard this is to do today.<\/p>\n

Much of this is not residents’ fault. \u00a0They only have so many hours in so many days to attend lectures while caring for patients. \u00a0Thanks to residency work-hour restrictions, those hours have become even fewer. \u00a0To make matters much worse, through the year residents are torn to different rotations at different times and different hospitals. \u00a0Since topics for EKG interpretation span over many lectures, it is impossible for residents to attend every lecture over the academic residency year. \u00a0Just like when a student misses half the lectures for a college course, it’s hard to get an A.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, I stood before a crowded room of about 35 to 40 residents and interns for their first of many EKG classes.\u00a0 There they sat, with their nicely pressed fluorescent-white lab coats ready to learn.\u00a0 They were quiet and respectful as they sized up their middle-aged physician attending who apologetically arrived 5 minutes late after seeing an urgent consult in the Emergency Room.\u00a0 They had no idea what to expect.\u00a0 In some ways, neither did I.<\/p>\n

I plugged in the obligatory USB thumb drive to the obligatory computer to display the obligatory Powerpoint presentation, then stopped.\u00a0 Up came the image on the screen.\u00a0 They turned toward it, oblivious how uninterested I was in the contents of the slide.\u00a0 I asked them a question.<\/p>\n

“How many of you don’t know the first thing about an EKG?”<\/p>\n

Their heads swung back to me, silently.\u00a0 Much of the room smiled, not certain where I was going.\u00a0 Hesitantly, a few hands rose in the air.<\/p>\n

I had never seen this before.\u00a0 As their soon-to-be instructor, I could not help but ask myself silently what the heck these kids have spent at least $200,000 of their parents’ money learning in medical school. How on earth can any student leave four years of medical school education and not know the first thing about an EKG?<\/p>\n

I pressed on.<\/p>\n

“How many of you know something about an EKG and its basics but realize you need to know more?”<\/p>\n

Relieved, I saw many more hands\u00a0go up.<\/p>\n

EKG reading is one of those basic skills about which every physician should at least have a rudimentary\u00a0knowledge.\u00a0\u00a0Medical school’s controlled classroom-like environment lends itself better to instruction of the basics rather than\u00a0hurried clinical rotations.\u00a0 Clinical rotations\u00a0are where residents should fine-tune their skills in this area.\u00a0\u00a0How and why some medical students are not even exposed to this basic skill before entering their internship\u00a0is one\u00a0question, but what\u00a0these young doctors are receiving for their huge costs of education is an even more important\u00a0one.<\/p>\n

As pressures continue to mount on physician salaries in the years ahead and their corresponding debts climb, perhaps we should ask ourselves why our young doctors continue to pay huge sums for their medical education when\u00a0the quality of the instruction\u00a0has been\u00a0allowed to slip to this level.<\/p>\n

Could it be that their academic instructors never attended an EKG class either?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Westby Fisher shares his experiences in an EKG class for residents and asks how young doctors can pay so much for their education but know so little about basic skills like the EKG.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1177,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1216,1358],"class_list":["post-30483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-electrophysiology","tag-ecg","tag-ekg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1177"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}