San Diego is probably my favorite city in the USA. I absolutely love it here. I worked here about 5 years ago and have always wanted to return. When I worked here before, I worked at a community health center between 3 different clinics. I liked working at 2 out of the 3 clinics. However, the clinic I hated was my main one (where I was at most days of the week). I didn’t like the leadership there and was always overwhelmed with the quantity of patients.
The opportunity for me to return to work with the same community health center was ideal this time. This is because I would be able to only work at one clinic, instead of floating around. I prefer this because when the clinics are large, it’s difficult to remember everyone’s names and where everything is when you are working there for just 3 months. It’s easier to get overwhelmed when you are not comfortable.
The usual patient per day volume is 20 patients per day per provider. I prefer to see closer to 16 patients per day. Due to covid, they converted some of their scheduled patients to phone visits. The phone visits are quick so this made me more comfortable with accepting to see 20 patients per day.
Before accepting the San Diego position, I was also asked to help out at my previous job in Virginia. They wanted me to start in January as well. I ultimately decided to move forward with the San Diego position for 2 main reasons. I needed to work at a family health center to gain more experience working in pediatrics. I had been working with only adults for the last 18 months. If I didn’t work with children soon, I would eventually lose both my skills and credentialing to be able to work with all ages.
The second reason is that it is obviously too cold for me in Virginia from January-March. I did work there during that time frame once, and it even snowed. Fortunately, they understood that I needed to gain some pediatric experience, and asked me if I could help out once I am done in April. I told them I would let them know once I started my new job in January.
I would love to go back to Virginia because I have a lot of friends there and it’s a quick plane ride from home. But I wanted to see what it was like to work with all ages again. Would I love it so much that I would want to continue working with pediatrics again? Would it be way easier than working with my usual complex geriatric population?
I was a bit nervous to start the job in San Diego because of my previous challenges. I am not a fan of the limited scope of medical assistants here. Such as not being able to swab for strep or flu. Yet, it has been 5 years since I worked here. Since then I have worked at 15 other places, including years of challenging geriatric work. I was curious to see if the job would be “simple” to me compared to other places I have worked.
