The Magic of the White Coat

As part of my job, I work in the actual hospital, on the floor, with patients. (My main realm is in an outpatient area). When I first started and we didn't have a uniform policy yet, we would wear long white lab coats over our "street" clothes so we could be more easily distinguished from just anyone. We started our uniform policy in April, which cleared up a lot of confusion for the patients on who was who. However, we still continued to wear our lab coats because we go from inpatient to outpatient settings fairly quickly and if we were to get some kind of inpatient, um, fluid, on us, we would have to wear it the rest of the day. So we wear lab coats.

I have been confused for a doctor many occasions. Usually it's by visitors or the patients themselves when I step in the room. I always explain who I am and my job, so they aren't confused. Today one of the nutritionists (who I can only suspect doesn't know me or didn't read my nametag) asked as I was writing in a patient's chart, "When do you project she [the patient] will be going home?" I immediately said, "I have no idea." Then it hit me when she seemed stunned that she was expecting that I WOULD know since I'm the DOCTOR and all. Funny.

My favorite part about wearing a white coat, though, is smiling at people. Doctors are quite busy and there are plenty of caring and compassionate ones, but when they're in transit like walking down the hall, they are hardly thinking about the people they see. They're usually on the phone or focused on the next task, whether it be outpatient clinic, another surgery, etc. So they don't usually greet those near them. But since I don't have those things to think about, I try and make sure I smile at everyone. And because the visitors and staff don't know I'm really not a doctor, they think, "Wow, what a nice doc! She smiled at me, how thoughtful!" I don't mind pretending in that notion, because then it means they have a good impression of our physicians and their caring nature. I see it on their faces, and it's pretty cool.

And I only went to 2.5 extra years of school, not 4+! :)