Hospital sold?

Well, I meant to write about this sooner. It's been news for about a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, my hospital was sold to county hospital district. But it's not official until November. It was a shock to hear this because I knew that if this hospital became public, a lot of doctors would leave (and this includes volunteer teaching attendings). No one really knew this was happening until it happened. I hate it when people are secretive and don't let any of the employees or my program know what's going on.

The good thing is our program director is contacting other hospitals as back up. We will stay at the possible public hospital only if it stays unopposed (no other residency programs) and that the training for residents doesn't diminish. And other hospitals are interested in providing us a place to train at and a lot of the same teaching attendings work at those hospitals as well.

The hospital says "that it plans to keep it a hospital for both private insured patients and noninsured patients". Yeah, that's pretty stupid. No private insured person in their right mind would go to a county hospital for care. Basically county was planning to build another hospital, but the location of this hospital was where a large population of uninsured were living at. So they wanted to instead buy this hospital rather than build another hospital. Also, this hospital is still making money, we are getting an increasing number of uninsured patients here.

One good thing that came out of this is - the hospital (not the residency program) gave every resident a raise in their salary - $3000. They did this as a way to compensate for the stress they caused us and to keep our program competitive with other FM residencies as interview season starts. This is because our residency program is not one the highest paid programs in the Houston area.

The name that people already came up with for my hospital is "Ben Taub South."

Well, I'll keep y'all updated on what's happening.

End of Dermatology

So dermatology was a pretty light month because I spent most days in the private dermatology clinic in Bellaire. But it was a lot of shadowing which I absolutely hate. Fridays were dermatology clinic at my clinic (where the residents see patients) and that was fun. No shadowing on Fridays and I do all the procedures. I basically do a lot of full skin exams to look for cancer. I got pretty comfortable by the end of this rotation.
I also did at least a dozen shave biopsies and freezing (liquid nitrogen) on pre-cancers (actinic keratoses). And I did a few steroid (kenalog) injections on keloids/hypertrophic scars. So I will definitely continue to do these procedures in my clinic. I'm glad I got the chance to get comfortable with these procedures. Next month I'll get to do other procedures. I'll be on surgery so I'll probably do excisions of cysts in clinic, I & Ds, and suturing in the OR.

Plus most of my weekends were free. Only on call twice this month.
Also, I did the NALS (neonatal) course this month. That was much easier than the PALS course. There's no monitor to look at. Don't need to shock the babies.