Dictations

Dictating discharge summaries is a drag. It's worse if you don't know anything about the patients in the first place. With patients whom I discharged on the first few days of a new rotation, I know so little about them that dictating their discharge summaries is like summarizing a novel without actually having read it. And then there are situations in some services when I don't actually follow the patients every day and I just happen to be the person discharging the patients. Obstetrics is an excellent example because I worked in different place every day and don't actually know any of the patients thoroughly.

In Internal Medicine, interns are so busy during the day that dictating summaries when discharging them is impossible - so it didn't surprise me to see my long list of delinquent dictations in my mailbox the other day. This afternoon I spent 3 hours dictating 6 summaries - what a torture....