Technology in the workplace
Posted by Way Siong | | Posted On Friday 25 March 2011 at 9:04 am
Term one has just ended for me two days ago, and surgical nights is officially over for me. It has been quite a journey, some great experiences and some not. Next up is Emergency, which should be fun, but from what I can tell with my experiences with the emergency people during nights, it's not that great a term, at least in this hospital. I won't get into the details of the politics, but I'll just have to see what's in store.
What I realised after going through the term is how much technology has helped me with my work. Despite hating Apple and the so called fanbois, I have purchased myself an iphone4. This phone has helped me quite a lot during the course of my work.
For start, there's calculators that allowed me to quickly add up severity scores, like Well's score and Ranson's scores. Then there's this app that quickly displays all the differentials to consider with a given clinical symptom. Add that to the army of books available and you can see how much power you can have in your fingertips to support your decision making process. This is especially important at nights, as many times you are the only one there to make the call and everyone else just looks at you, waiting for you to make the decision and assessment.
One day I had to insert an IV cannula into a Russian patient who just recently pulled out her old one. She was a non-english speaker and no one could convince her to get another one. Getting intepreters was out of the question at 3 am in the morning, and the patient was getting increasingly agitated since we can't understand each other. I took out my phone, launched the google translate app, typed in the things i wanted to say and it reads it out aloud in russian! Problem solved, patient finally settled down and IV line inserted. hehe!
Soon I will get myself iMIMS, which would allow me to quickly look up medications and its interactions. It does cost a bomb though.
Technology has changed how we do things and personally it has improved my working experience. What about you?
What I realised after going through the term is how much technology has helped me with my work. Despite hating Apple and the so called fanbois, I have purchased myself an iphone4. This phone has helped me quite a lot during the course of my work.
For start, there's calculators that allowed me to quickly add up severity scores, like Well's score and Ranson's scores. Then there's this app that quickly displays all the differentials to consider with a given clinical symptom. Add that to the army of books available and you can see how much power you can have in your fingertips to support your decision making process. This is especially important at nights, as many times you are the only one there to make the call and everyone else just looks at you, waiting for you to make the decision and assessment.
One day I had to insert an IV cannula into a Russian patient who just recently pulled out her old one. She was a non-english speaker and no one could convince her to get another one. Getting intepreters was out of the question at 3 am in the morning, and the patient was getting increasingly agitated since we can't understand each other. I took out my phone, launched the google translate app, typed in the things i wanted to say and it reads it out aloud in russian! Problem solved, patient finally settled down and IV line inserted. hehe!
Soon I will get myself iMIMS, which would allow me to quickly look up medications and its interactions. It does cost a bomb though.
Technology has changed how we do things and personally it has improved my working experience. What about you?
