What does a house officer do in PIMS, General medicine

Well, this might vary from hospital to hospital and country to country, but I’ll share what we have here in PIMS, Islamabad, for the house officers.

This is what I’ve experienced myself during my housejob in General Medicine team- 2 of Dr Rauf Niazi in Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, Islamabad, the tertiary care hospital of the capital of the country.

The house job rotation period in the general medicine is 2 months. During this period, the house officer has to work at three places, ward, emergency and opd. Details of the work done at these places is as follows:

What does a house officer do in PIMS – General Medicine

First I’ll outline whats “required” to be done by house officer during housejob in pims general medicine. Things which he CAN do if he’s interested and get a chance to do will be listed later.

SOP for house officers in ward

1. timing 8am to 2pm (however, he or she has to stay after 2 if their ward beds work isn’t complete)
2. sampling of ward beds patients (all sort of sampling, all blood drawing and stuff is done by the house officer, along with some other nursing staffs work too)
3. accompanying patient when he goes for ct scan, echo, taking time for their ultrasonography and ct scan, mri etc, (along with some other ward boy stuff too)
4. history taking & examination (pg trainee takes their own history, so ho’s history isn’t used in patients management)
5. progress notes (again, pg writes their own notes)
6. bsr and vitals monitoring, ecg (after bringing ecg machine from other wards) (again, along with other nurses work)
7. passing nasogastric tube, catheterization of the patient
8. tracing labs of the patient
9. etc (includes some other related stuff)

 SOP for house officers in ER (Emergency Room)

1. Presence in ER when they have duty there
2. bsr and vitals monitoring of patients who need it
3. injecting insulin, i/v fluids etc to the patients. Nursing staff helps in that too
4. sampling of blood, nursing staff helps in that too in ER (but not in wards unfortunately)
5. making investigation slips for the investigations ordered by the pg (post graduate trainee on call)
6. informing pg to come to ER when a patient is referred to general medicine
7. passing nasogastric tube, foleys catheterization of the patient
8. abg’s (Arterial Blood Gases)
9. tracing lab reports of the patient
10. taking patient to ultrasound, shifting to departments etc

SOP for house officers in OPD

1. after doing blood sampling and other nurse and ward boys stuff in ward they’ll goto opd on their opd day
2. making investigation slips ordered by seniors
3. taking patient to the senior / other department required

In the end, this prepares the house officer for managing patients in remote areas, as once his housejob is complete, he won’t be in hospital setup and will be working in some clinic or remote region until he gets admission or post graduate training.

This routine in 2 months is carefully designed by the head of departments (Dr Jamal Zafar and Dr Rauf Niazi) to make the house officer capable enough of managing all the acute emergencies, most opd cases and managing normal ward patients.