Concerned

I'm concerned. I seem to have a lot of concerns of late. And I seem to vent a lot about my concerns on here. Does this make me seem like an angry person? lol.

I've been here for about almost 2 weeks now, had one week of actual hospital experience, but this is technically my 3rd week of my O&G rotation. I will soon be getting my mid-rotation assessment, and starting next week I will be having these mini-CEX's (clinical evaluation exercise) which are a method of assessing skills essential to the provision of good clinical care. I'm just worried because I feel I will be graded on the expected 3 weeks of experience even though I've only had one. *sigh*

Anyway, I've been quite exhausted so far this week even though I haven't really done much. Maybe orientation is draining in how boring it is. Apparently the US is quite backwards and behind in its CPR standards. We had a review of CPR here and things have changed since I last went through the steps. You no longer give breaths at the beginning during the ABC's section, and you don't check for a pulse either. You go straight from look, listen, and feeling to compressions. There's a couple other changes, but those were the most significant. What bugged me about the guy doing the lecture was that when I brought up the difference between what we had been taught and what he was telling us now was his response. That response was that we were still using the old 2005 standards and were behind while they were using the new 2010 standards. It wasn't so much what he said as how he said (isn't that how it always is?), with a hint of smugness. Otherwise, the guy was funny, entertaining, informative, and could be kind of cute. And I have no problem with learning something new, I would have just liked for him to explain the new change and how it improved upon the old. Rather then just assuming that I was hung up on the old standard because that's just how I always did it, as he put it. I'm not hung up on it. I just want to understand. Plus I have taught it, so I'm doubly interested in the new changes. I know the standards change every 5 years so I'm sure we're due for another overhaul (though there was a fairly recent change I think). I'm not going to just assume that these new standards are better because you say so. Help me understand. How do I know that the UK and the US don't have different standards? I would assume that CPR is a universally taught standard, and I'm fine with you guys being ahead. No big deal. I'm not one to think that America is better than everyone else and that we know everything. I know there are a lot of things we fall short on.

British people are so disappointing. I had expected them to be more cultured, accepting, polite, well-mannered etc than the average American I guess. Perhaps I had idealized them and held them to too high a standard resulting from my reading in my younger days because so far they have done nothing but disappoint. I've found that the typical American is much more accepting and less bigoted, in my opinion, than most of the lovely English I have had the pleasure of meeting. Sheesh. Now I've started my ranting again. Grrr...

Back to CPR. So I went to Google and did a search on the new 2010 guidelines. There are new guidelines, but they won't go into effect until October 2010. CPR is an international standard and there is an international review board that looks into all the problems and questions people have had on improving CPR and implements the changes based on this feedback and research. And often the UK is ahead of the US in a lot of the medical and healthcare managements. Nice. Good for you guys. That's awesome. Who's got the ego now? You want to drop down and compare size?