Bri is a Family Medicine Physician at the Carilion Clinic in Roanoke, Virginia. Bri is currently finishing up her residency so she spends a large portion of her time rotating between the hospital, speciality clinics, and her home primary care practice where she has an established group of patients. During a busy shift, Bri can see a new patient every 15 to 20 minutes with issues ranging from an infant’s first appointment to casting a broken arm or even discussing hospice care for cancer patients.
Transcript
My name is Bree Beach. I'm a family medicine physician. I'm currently working at Carilion Clinic in Roanoke, and finishing up my residency there. So I think for us it's more about just kinda taking care of you in all aspects of life so not just, you know at that time you have belly pain and that's all we're focused on. We're focusing on everything that happens to you on a daily basis, you know understanding that your grandpa that we also see in the clinic is sick and so, you know you may not be doing as well on a daily basis because of that. So just looking at you from more than just your complaint of the day and you know how your job plays into it, how your kids play into it and everything else. So sometimes we're in a hospital. Sometimes we're in an outpatient specialty clinics, but at the root of all of it, we have our own clinic that you think of, you know that you'd go to for any kind of primary care where I have my own patients that I see. So at least, about two to three days a week I'm there seeing patients and then the other parts of the week I can be off doing all sorts of different things. It could be on a surgery rotation, it could be taking care of our inpatients service, it could be delivering babies, it just depends on the month. Busy shift in our clinic, I start seeing patients at 8:00 a.m. and see patients all the way through til 5:00, and they're every 15 to 20 minutes one after another. You can literally see anything and that's what I love about it. So I can go from one room where I'm meeting with a family talking about, you know hey should we be looking more at hospice care and talking about stopping treating your cancer, and then I go to the next room and it's a one month old there for you know their first doctor's visit. It can be anything in between, so we bounce around from chronic disease stuff like diabetes and high blood pressure, to the sniffles, to sometimes you know we're doing stitches or someone walks in after falling off a bike and needing to get a cast, so everything in a span of a day. Our program is set up where we have what's called night floats, so there's a couple weeks out of the year that you're working strictly nights in the hospital, which helps cut down on how much call you have to take at home. So, there's always somebody in the hospital 24/7 for our service, but we have a few weekends out of the year that you have to go in and work the weekend so that the impatient team can have a day off.
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