Anesthesia Rotation Primer  (1 of 8)

Getting Started

So, you’re starting out on a new clinical rotation with an entirely new department, in a completely foreign setting, armed with some vague recollection about anesthetic drugs from lectures during your second year in medicine, yet almost completely clueless about anesthesiology.  You know you’ve only been given two weeks for this rotation, and you’re thinking it’ll be impossible to truly understand all the principles of anesthesiology just from chatting with anesthesia residents and watching intubations.  Is it going to be another “read-this-handbook-and-you’ll-get-it” kind of ordeal?  The sort that teaches you some useful stuff, but by the time it all starts to make sense, the rotation is over, leaving you with a fragmented picture of what we do but very little understanding of how we do it?

So how do you get the most out of it?

This guide was meant to provide a brief overview of what we do, how we do it, and why we do it for typical, uncomplicated cases—the kind of cases you are bound to see during your rotation.  The information included here was not intended to be comprehensive or to be a do-it-yourself guide.  Instead, it is meant to help you see the big picture in a one-sitting quick read, and a handy reference as you go along.  With a basic understanding of anesthetic principles, it becomes easier to understand variations in techniques between anesthesiologists and among different scenarios.  Investing some time to read through this primer will definitely make it much easier to either cruise through the rotation (for the “breezy rotator”) or to learn more stimulating principles that may  benefit you in the future (for the “lifelong learner”).

So read on a bit, and hopefully you’ll find your rotation quite enjoyable.

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