For my 5th rotation I was at an outpatient pediatric clinic and was very excited to work there as Peds was one of my interests coming into PA school. Throughout my 5 week experience I learned a lot of new skills and improved on previous skills as well. One would be working on my venipunctures which I feel as I am now very confident in doing, as before I would only look to see if I could find a vein but with the help of my preceptor I was able to feel for a vein when visibility may be compromised. 

Throughout my rotation I would say I came across a lot of memorable patients but for me it would have to be seeing patients that were a couple days out of the hospital, newly borned. This patient population for me was very nerve wracking as I wanted to be as gentle as possible. So seeing new born babies come to the clinic with their parents was a different experience for me as my previous rotation, my population was much older. 

To add to my last paragraph, something that was a great challenge for me was taking blood from patients that were less than a week old. One of our patients needed blood taken to see if there was an elevated TSH, so taking the blood was key to see his levels. This task was extremely difficult as before I even tried to look for the vein, I tried to palpate to see where I could possibly get blood. But after a short while I was not comfortable taking the blood, so I decided to let my preceptor know. This was important to me as I know whenever there comes a time when I don’t feel comfortable, I should always let someone know.

Lastly a skill I had to progressively learn was taking history from the parents in regards to their child. Some of my patient population was not at the stage of speaking as of yet, so taking history from the parents was key in diagnosing the patient. On top of this, my patient population was majority Spanish so I had to translate as well as try to get the parents to communicate the baby’s concern. But throughout the month  I realized a lot of complaints were similar so from the baby’s PE and parents’ communication I was able to better take HPIs and learn a bit more Spanish as well.