Featured Intern: Playing Detective

By: Amanda Sauceda

I am rounding the halfway mark for my nutrition therapy rotation; time has gone by fast!  I have picked up a rhythm now and I pretty much know where everything is and the process of how to find out the stuff I don’t know.  

At first on of the most intimidating things was actually finding out all the info I needed from a patients chart.  On my first day I remember my supervisor telling me that we have to play nutrition detectives and that is so true!  Oftentimes all the pieces that I need are never in one spot so I have to go through the chart (which can be pretty thick depending on their length of stay) and find out everything I need.  As I gather all the info there will be pieces that don’t match or items I just can’t find from the chart and that’s when I have to go to the nurse or another person on the team.  Interviewing the patient can be very enlightening because then you might find out something that wasn’t in the chart because you can actually see the patient and might find out something like you see they are getting food from home.  And the next step after getting all this info is document it all and where you got that piece of info.  This way when the next person comes in to follow up on the patient’s progress they’ll know how you arrived at your recommendation.

So playing the detective is a big part of the hospital setting.  You really got to gather all the pieces about the patient from different parts in the chart, interviewing the patient, etc.