Starting a new locum position can be a little stressful. There are expectations of you many times that you must hit the door running. The group is paying you a lot of money to fill this temporary position and they may not have the resources to put someone with you to give you a proper orientation.
I can remember one job I started. The people were very friendly but they did not have a lot of staff. Hence the reason I was there. If there isn’t a staffing problem then my job disappears. At the time I had no experience with EPIC. So they put me with another CRNA in a day full of cataracts. Lucky for me these were 45 minute cataracts. Normally this would have made me insane but when it is your first day…it’s a blessing. We did one case together and my CRNA EPIC tutor was pulled to another room and I was left to fend for myself. Luckily I tend to pick up technology fairly quickly but EPIC has so many pieces when you are starting out. I made it through the day managing to not close one single case unbeknownst to me. However all patients went home just fine. Only a few days later did I learn that I had not closed one single chart correctly.
The first 2 weeks I was learning how they do things. Yes I made mistakes. My mistakes were related to charting and more admin styled mistakes. I can happily say that I did not make any mistakes that in any way could have caused detriment to the patient.
When we start a new assignment we must slow things down. Only proceed at a pace you are comfortable with and that you feel like you can perform safely. Upon entering the OR in the beginning of a contract I will walk up to the circulator and say something like this..”I am going to go ahead and apologize for my excessive neediness and how slow I will probably be going.” Most of the time this is taken very well and they tend to try and help me out. I did say most of the time. Of course I have been in those situations where all the staff is stressed and no one is happy. When that happens I just try to be positive and do the best I can knowing that by the end of this assignment we will all be friends.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable. You will not feel comfortable the first few weeks you are working in this new environment. That is why you need to embrace it and realize that this is the way it is supposed to feel. You are proving yourself all over again. The staff doesn’t know what great anesthesia feat you just recently accomplished. They don’t know you just did that complicated Aorta-Bifem or that crashing C-Section where you helped save 2 lives at your last assignment. You get to prove yourself all over again.
Embrace the discomfort and work within your mind to create ways to slow down the chaos that may be going on around you and focus back to the basics. If you forget to fill out the billing paperwork or misplace the QA sheet don’t get too caught up about that. Those things can be fixed. Always bring your focus back to what you have been trained to do over and over and that doesn’t change no matter what environment you are placed in. Get comfortable being uncomfortable.