Preparation for Practice: Erinn Coe

Hands on. That’s what the third year of training means when you’re in the NEOMED College of Medicine.  Thanks to solid preparation, Erinn Coe was able to confidently step into a series of clerkships in eight different clinical areas.

An experience during her first, a nine-week internal medicine rotation, was a touching reminder of what makes all of the hard work worthwhile.

Coe was working with a pulmonologist who performed a special procedure on a man in his thirties who had suffered for years from persistent, severe asthma. When the team went into the waiting room afterward to tell his mother that the procedure had gone well, she started crying and told the doctor she felt like he had saved her son’s life. “It was…,’’ Coe stops to search for words. “It’s why you go into medicine.’’

She shares that initially, she was a little nervous about interacting with patients, but soon realized that she had the preparation she needed, thanks to experience with Standardized Patients at NEOMED’s Wasson Center for Clinical Skills Training, Assessment, and Scholarship.  As first- and second-year students complete classroom work in anatomy and physiology, they also begin to take patient histories, and then do physical exams, which paid off when she got to an actual hospital setting, says Coe.

“In the patient interactions I’ve had so far, it’s amazing how often I find myself going back to, ‘If I were in the Wasson Center, what questions would I be expected to ask this patient?’ The questions we learned to ask were all clinically relevant and information that we should be gathering,’’ says Coe.

At the Wasson Center, faculty provide feedback from training sessions. Such feedback has taught Erinn not to diagnose a patient too quickly, but rather to ask enough questions to rule out all relevant possibilities.

The aspiring surgeon also found it gratifying to help patients during a three-week session with an orthotics and prosthetics company—fulfilling a NEOMED requirement to work with an allied health care professional—that makes many of the devices for their patients in their own workshop, housed in the back of the office. “I liked the hands-on aspect and going back into the workshop to figure out a solution for the patient,’’ says Coe.

She has tucked away the knowledge gained of how prosthetists and orthopedists interact with physicians.

When Erinn Coe is a physician treating a patient with a specific need, she’ll be well prepared to refer them.