Rylee McDonnell (OCHS 2017) is doing her medical school rotations at Shore Medical Center
SOMERS POINT — For medical student Rylee McDonnell, doing her third-year rotations at Shore Medical Center is a homecoming.
The 2017 Ocean City High School graduate from Estell Manor earned her undergraduate degree from Goucher College in Baltimore, where she continued her soccer career after being a center back for the Red Raiders.
She elected to go to medical school at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (PCOM) because it was surrounded by medical institutions, places to dine and see so she could “have a life outside medicine.” And because PCOM was a friendly environment.
“Medicine can be a very cutthroat education process,” she said in an interview with the Sentinel on Aug. 28. “I didn’t feel that at all at PCOM. People were very willing to share resources they find helpful, study guides, flash cards, group study sessions. It just seemed like a great environment for the most stressful years of my life.
“I played soccer growing up. I’m a big fan of the team aspect. I felt like I could find people who could be my team for this journey.”
Her medical school journey began with two years of academic learning, pre-clinical, lectures, exams. The second two years are clinical rotations with hands-on training.
For this, her third year, she chose to do her rotations at Shore Medical Center.
“In our third year we have a bunch of core electives. We do cardiology, OB-GYN, pediatrics, family med, internal med, surgery. And then fourth year, once you’ve kind of seen everything, and you kind of have a better feel of what you’re interested in, I get to set up elective rotations,” she said.
McDonnell said there was a comfort factor involved with choosing Shore.
“It’s nice to be back home. I’m familiar with the area. I was born here, did some shadowing hours here during college so it is a very familiar environmental for me. That is comforting when I’m doing new things,” McDonnell said.
The familiarity is comforting as she embarks on the first of two years in a hospital setting.
“I’ve been doing practice questions and I’ve learned all the content, and those steps, but the actual applying of it is new. And it’s actual real live patients. I’m influencing their care and that’s scary,” she said. “And it’s a good thing that it’s scary because it means I’m aware of how important it is. It’s nice to be in an environment that is familiar to me while I’m doing something like that.”
McDonnell is interested in family medicine at this point and “had a really great time” doing that rotation earlier this summer. The family medicine rotation was with Shore Physicians Group (SPG) in Ocean City. The medical students do rotations under Shore Quality Partners, which is a network of independent physicians, employed physicians through SPG, and Shore Medical Center.
She enjoys the community aspect of family medicine, meeting not just the patient but often with family members, some who would remember her from another visit or would mention seeing the doctor out riding a bike in town.
“That was just a nice aspect, seeing real life existing with medicine, versus just the practice questions (from college),” she said. “I like people, so it’s nice for me to see the person and the medicine versus just the medicine.”
In her fourth year she is leaning toward more family medicine rotations “so I can see different patient populations. I can learn from different doctors in the specialties and confirm if that is what I want to do.”
Her first rotation at Shore was in the psychiatry department, another experience she enjoyed.
Dr. Leonard Galler and Dr. Daniel Jacoby, the two physician advisers to the PCOM program who work with core clinical campus coordinator Chris Wodazak, explained there is an advantage to working at a community hospital such as Shore.
The medical students can get exposure to other aspects while doing their rotations. (See related stories at ocnjsentinel.com that appeared in last week’s edition of the Sentinel.)
“During the psychiatry (rotation), for example, we worked with social workers and case management and we got to go in and see the insurance piece of things,” McDonnell said.
“We don’t learn that much about insurance and what covers what in school, so it is interesting to be able to go on rounds with the hospitalist team and then go back with the social worker and watch them make calls, watch them arrange rehab facilities or nursing homes. If it wasn’t working out (I see) what their next steps were because a lot does happen before the discharge, before that patient is allowed to leave. It was very helpful for me to see that aspect of it.”
McDonnell added that she had a little downtime before rounds so the hospitalist sent her down to the Emergency Department to talk to a patient who had just arrived.
Unlike at larger medical centers in which medical students may be in separate facilities for each rotation, Shore Medical Center is more compact and allows for her preceptors to fill downtime in another area, expanding on the students’ experiences.
Not that free time is actually free for a medical student.
“A lot of my downtime does consist of doing practice questions and flash cards, because at the end of each rotation I do have to take a test on the material for that specialty,” she said.
McDonnell said the core rotations in the 10 months she’ll be at Shore have been laid out either at the hospital or with SPG.
Expectations met
“I knew the program was small coming into it and I was expecting to get a lot of one-on-one time with the physicians …. I knew the people here were very friendly, so that has been great. All the nursing staff has been super nice to me and all the other students from what I can see,” she said.
The intimacy of a smaller environment is paying dividends.
“I have really enjoyed that when I go into a patient’s room I’m not just getting swept into the room as another person. I’m getting introduced to the patient. I’m allowed to ask them questions. I’m allowed to do the physical exam because the team is me and the attending (physician) versus at a bigger hospital where it could be the attending, two residents, a medical student from PCOM, a medical student from another school, a P.A. student. It could be a big group where you kind of get shuffled along the way,” McDonnell said.
“I feel very involved in the patient care. When something interesting happens, someone will come get me. They will try to find us so we can see things, giving us lots of opportunities to talk to patients. ‘This patient just came in. Go talk to them and tell me what you found.’
“It doesn’t feel like busy work. It feels like I’m actively contributing to the patient care.”
McDonnell said the students will be excused from the rounds so they can attend lectures to expose them to new topics. A pharmacy lecture was about which antibiotics the hospital is using because trends change. Wodazak organized a talk with a recent residency graduate to be able to relate his experience on what a residency feels like. After four years of undergraduate college and four years of medical school, the next step for these future doctors is residency.
Learning what questions to ask
Asked what she wants to get most out of her third-year rotations, McDonnell said she is trying to be a sponge while acknowledging she is facing a wealth of information through her experiences.
“I’ve been taught that a lot of medicine is knowing what questions to ask. I have really enjoyed listening to how my attendings have interviewed patients, how they ask questions, what ways their brain jump to answer the questions. It’s been a great experience seeing that in action and in different specialties,” she said.
What she sees her attending physicians do varies by discipline.
“I had never done a psychiatric history before and that was what I was doing,” she said of her experience during the psychiatry rotation. “They have to look at very different things versus what the cardiologist is looking at.
“It’s definitely a lot of information. I’m just trying to be a sponge and take in all that I can, even if it’s just one thing a day that stood out to me, but mainly just seeing how the doctors interact with the patients and how they reassure them. Doing their best to find the answers. Give the best care.”
She noted she was impressed that early in her stint with the hospitalist service at Shore how the doctors take a lot of time sitting down with the patients and families for an extended period to let them ask questions, rather than just popping their face in, rattling off information and then saying they’ll be back.
Future uncertain
Asked whether she could see herself back at the Jersey shore when she’s ready to practice medicine, McDonnell acknowledged “life’s a little up in the air.”
She said she’ll have to see where she matches when she finishes medical school, but a lot of her family is in southern New Jersey. Three generations of her family were born at Shore Medical Center and the youngest of her three sisters, Coryn, is a senior at OCHS and on the soccer team. Philadelphia isn’t that far away.
“I could see myself remaining in the area. I love the summer months. I like it a lot more in the winter when there are no people here,” she said, a common sentiment among those who live full-time at the shore. “I do think it’s a great area. I enjoyed growing up here. I could see myself here.”
– STORY and PHOTOS by DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff