Sierra is a Research Assistant at University of Minnesota, working in the Families and Long-Term Care Project. With a goal of easing the burden for family and friends who care to memory-loss patients, Sierra and her department are researching the effects of a mobile device that can alert caregivers to any unexpected movements by the patient. When not on campus, Sierra is also a medical scribe, working with her assigned physician in the local hospital’s emergency room, observing and taking notes on the patient diagnosis and treatment.
Transcript
My name is Sierra Trost and currently for a living I have two jobs; I work at The U of M Twin Cities as a Research Assistant in the Families in Long-Term Care Projects through the School of Nursing. And I also work at a hospital in the Emergency Department as a Medical Scribe. Yeah, so a typical day is I get paired with a provider everyday so if a shift is noon to eight that's what the provider's shift is as well. So I'll go there, meet up with the provider I see all the patients with them and then I write down history of present illnesses sort of what the background story for the patient is. And then I also clean up their charts so their medical history is their current medications, if they're a smoker or non-smoker. So I kind of go through it with the provider it's not the provider goes and comes and tells me and I just write it down. Like I get to see the interaction which I really enjoy I get to see if, how the patients respond to certain things that a provider does, how providers respond to some things that patients will do. And so you go through with that and then you also at the very end write down it's called the "Impression and Plan" but it's basically like what the patient has and then how the Doctor is going to either treat them or request follow-up. So that is very helpful for learning sort of like just how to diagnose and just the various things that I would have never seen if I hadn't been a Scribe. But what we do in the Families in Long-Term Care Projects is we aim to alleviate the stress of caregiving for someone with Alzheimer's 'cause a lot of responsibility and a lot of stress comes with caring for someone with memory loss, and so we aim to alleviate that with our projects and there are multiple projects we're working on right now: there are remote health technology where it's like a sensor system set up in the house of the person with memory loss and it just sends alerts to the caregiver's phone if they've been out of bed at midnight or if they've been outside at an odd hour of the day so it just helps them with that, that's one of 'em.
Download transcript
