Making the Most of Your Clinical Rotations: 10 Essential Tips
Key takeaways:
Clinical rotations can be the most difficult yet rewarding aspect of your medical education.
Excelling in rotations is not easy and requires being involved, staying curious, cultivating trust, planning ahead, and requesting feedback.
There is no one recipe for success. Ask each team what will help them specifically and, through it all, remain kind to yourself.
Clinical rotations are an important aspect of your medical education. They are opportunities to crystallize knowledge you have spent hours mastering and to apply what you’ve learned in your studies to various patients.
But flourishing in these new environments is not always straightforward. Although each one is different, there are key habits you can practice to excel in all of your clinical rotations. Below, we discuss what they are.
10 tips for making the most of your rotations
Below are essential tips to thriving during clinical rotations and beyond — from being a team player to practicing self-care.
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1. Ask questions
No one in medicine knows everything. To master your field, you must ask questions.
At the beginning of a rotation, you may have numerous questions. Dedicate a journal to writing them down, so that you don’t lose track of them. (This becomes helpful when you are doing rounds and want to avoid interrupting your teammate’s presentation.) Journaling also provides an opportunity to reflect and increase your engagement with the material, among many other benefits.
Develop “how” and “why” questions, such as: “Why select this medication over another?” or “How did you conclude this diagnosis versus another one?” This helps facilitate discussion and clinical reasoning.
It’s also important to understand when is the right time to raise questions. If in doubt, ask your team for a time during the day to discuss what’s happened during the shift.
2. Be a team player
Medicine is a team sport. On every team, each individual has a role to play that is important to achieving the collective goal. In our case, that goal is optimizing patient care.
To achieve this, understand how you can be an asset to your team. Ask attendings, residents, and interns how you can ease their workload. This may mean accepting an overnight admission alongside other interns, updating families, collecting collateral information from facilities, arranging primary care appointments, volunteering to see the next appointment, or printing out the day’s list of patients.
These recommendations are not exhaustive. Being helpful is contextual to each rotation, so be sure you ask your team members what will help them.
3. Learning goals and shelf preparation
Doing well on the shelf exam is important for your overall success, as it is heavily weighted in your final grade. Therefore, preparation is critical.
Prior to starting a rotation, ask your peers what they used to prepare for their rotation’s shelf exam — what they found most useful and anything they would have done differently. Some people may utilize online question banks, video lectures, YouTube channels, or textbooks.
Once you’ve decided what to use to prepare, draw up a plan. Use that plan as a flexible guide rather than a firm path, as clinical rotations are unpredictable. Try your best to be consistent, which will maximize your performance on the shelf.
4. Practice self-care
Research has shown that medical training is strongly associated with anxiety and depression. In one national survey of medical students, over 32% of the nearly 4,400 respondents met criteria for alcohol dependence and abuse, a rate twice as high as age-matched populations not in the medical field. And medical students exhibit higher rates of dropout intention as compared to other students, according to another study.
Understand that the road to clinical rotations will not be without missteps. You may miss a question, stumble over a presentation, or forget to follow up on a task. Whatever happens, show yourself compassion. Your choice to pursue this career speaks to your intelligence, discipline, and commitment to others. Practice this same commitment with yourself, aiming for consistent growth over unattainable perfection.
Engage in activities that bring you joy. Spend a part of the day on yourself, whether it is related to nutrition, physical activity, interpersonal relations, spiritual growth, or a hobby. Call your loved ones and friends, play video games, watch that next episode, scroll through social media, walk outside, or take a warm bath.
However you choose to practice self-care, do not feel guilty for prioritizing yourself. One study found that medical students who engaged in self-care activities reported less stress and a higher quality of life.
As always, if you feel overwhelmed, please reach out for professional help.
5. Form professional habits
Do not underestimate how far a pleasant demeanor can go. Try your best to show enthusiasm, including dressing appropriately, for rotations. Most importantly, always show up on time.
Life happens, so you may be late sometimes. But you should try to inform your resident ahead of time to cultivate trust and healthy communication. Upending your reputation by being late is difficult to overcome, so practice punctuality to avoid negative evaluations.
6. Develop your bedside manner
Strive to always be professional with your patients. Proper bedside manner helps encourage meaningful conversations and has been linked to improvements in various conditions, greater adherence to therapy, and reduced health care utilization. A list of best practices for bedside manner can be found here.
One crucial skill that is often overlooked is patient-centered listening. Multiple studies have shown clinicians rarely ask patients to explain the reasons for their visit and are quick to interrupt them. One famous study found that patients were interrupted by physicians after 18 seconds on average, while another found interruptions occurred after about 23 seconds. And a more recent study found that patients went uninterrupted by physicians in only 26% of office visits.
Be mindful of this pitfall. Compared to your teammates, you have more time to listen to patients and build that therapeutic bridge. By doing this, you will cement healthy professional habits that will carry you far in your training, while simultanously improving patient-centered care.
7. Connect with your peers
Rotations each have their own unique workflow. Read through your school’s rotation expectations, but also reach out to peers for advice, especially those who recently completed a rotation that you’re doing. They can provide insight about what attendings and residents expect, how to find workrooms, the ideal parking location, presentations preferences, the best study resources, and which diseases merit review prior to starting the rotation.
8. Go all-in on your least favorite rotation
You may enter a rotation with knowledge of the specialty you want to pursue. Having a sense of which field you enjoy will help you craft your application. However, one pitfall is to blow off a rotation if it is not related to your desired pursuits.
Disinterest can manifest subconsciously and your team will be able to sense it, leading to poorer evaluations. Be engaged and draw connections between a clerkship you’re less interested in and your desired field to ensure you do not radiate apathy.
9. Get to know your patients
You will likely have fewer patients than your residents. Take this as an opportunity to understand the patient better than anyone else. Monitor their charts daily, follow up on labs and imaging, research and discuss their clinical problems, reconnect with them in the afternoons, update families, etc.
Your efforts will cultivate patient ownership and convey enthusiasm for patient care, something your team will recognize and reward you with high marks for.
10. Ask for feedback
Do not wait until the end of rotation to review your evaluations. Rather, play an active role in your growth and seek out constructive feedback.
Ask your residents and attending for their thoughts on your presentations, documentation, and clinical knowledge. Asking earlier on allows you time to incorporate their feedback into your work.
You will become a better clinician and also cut through the vague, subjective grading standards of each team’s preferences, resulting in a better end-of-rotation evaluation. And, as shown in this study, seeking out feedback facilitates a student’s sense of control over their learning, leading to more enthusiasm for their work.
The bottom line
Clinical rotations are among the most important yet challenging times in your medical education. There is no recipe for guaranteed success. However, incorporating certain habits during rotations helps position you as a valuable member of the team. Consistently seek out feedback while maintaining curiosity and enthusiasm. And practice the same kindness you show your patients with yourself.
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