Dictation

For the first time, I am working in a hospital. When I have written progress notes for therapy before, I just write them as a word document and print it out for the patient's chart. In my last clinic, I sometimes just hand wrote them. But at the hospital, I now get to dictate. I was nervous at first, thinking it would be incredibly complicated and that to make changes I would have to start the dictation over or edit more after the transcription came through. But no. I learned that since an actual human being transcribes our dictations, we can talk to them like a real person.

When I get good at this, I will hopefully just call in and run through a shpeal about a patient, and be done with it. I like to think that I will bore the transcribers when I get to that point. I mean, their job is to sit there and type what I say - so boring. So in the meantime, I hope I'm entertaining them when I make a complete fool of myself by saying, "um, yeah, I don't really know what I was saying right then. Maybe just cut out that last non-sentence sentence." or in a recent note when I mentioned a couple times that a patient was 15-years-old, and then remembered that her birthday was yesterday, so she was now 16. "Oh crap...that should actually be 16-years-old. I guess that should probably change in the first section, too...and anywhere else I said her age." And that doesn't even touch on the first dictation I did, where I got so lost in the middle of it that I said, "ummmm, hold on......[30 seconds of silence before finally just hanging up]" I have no idea what they'll do with that one, since the transcriptions haven't shown up for me to sign yet.

Until I get better at this, the people doing transcription will think I am either the most entertaining person doing dictation or the most annoying...