Aside from the abundace of farms this is our typical view while driving to rural patients and we cant complain!
It’s been a crazy transition to home health. People are right when they say it’s a totally different beast!
We are used to treating patients in a medical environment: the clinic. Now we are treating patients in their environment: their home. This brings a whole level of complexity that never existed before.
We vary widely with how many people we see in a day depending on the census, new admissions, and patients schedules. It also depends on if we are seeing people for start of care, evaluation, regular treatment, reassessment or discharge. We see anywhere from 2 to 6 people a day with an average of 4 to 5.
The most difficult part has without a doubt been scheduling. One day last week I (Patrick) worked 12 hours. The next day, I barely made it to 6 hours. People don’t answer their phones to schedule appointments, and occasionally forget that they had scheduled appointments at all! It always feels bad after driving up to an hour to arrive to an empty house. We have also had difficulty reaching patients as well because people see our Pennsylvania area code and automatically think spam or telemarketer.
Besides the difficulty scheduling, it has been overall a very pleasant experience. We both got sufficient training with Oasis and Homecare Homebase (the documentation systems used for home health) and plenty of time shadowing/asking questions before heading out on our own. That’s more than we can say about any skilled nursing facility we have encountered. We were also pleasantly surprised with the training we received because usually travelers are expected to start with a full caseload their first day
As for the driving: We have averaged anywhere from 40 miles in a day to over 170. The agency we work for is growth oriented, meaning that they are more likely to pick up patients from a wide radius and have their clinicians drive further at the expense of efficiency. At least that’s the vibe we’re getting so far.
We have been driving mostly south of Modesto, and to more rural areas. Most of our drives have been through open farm land before reaching highway 99. The scenery consists of massive sprawling almond orchards, sweet potato fields, and vineyards. On a clear day the snow capped Sierra mountains can be seen to the east in the distance, though the mountains are much further away and not as prominent in the landscape as they were in Tacoma.
These pictures are from one of the many local almond orchards. It is our first time seeing almond trees and we decided to explore to get a closer look on our first weekend.
We have both noticed that, in general, Californians are speed demon drivers. It’s not uncommon to be cruising at 65 mph on a country straight away and get passed by someone wanting to do 85 (The speed limit is usually 45 or 55 mph). The speed limit seems to be however fast the car will go around here. I’ve (Patrick) not experienced many aggressive drivers as of yet. Erin might tell you differently.
The drives have given us time to listen to podcasts and audiobooks. I (Patrick) just finished Neil degrasse Tyson’s “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry”. It’s a 3.5 hour long audiobook that aims to give the listener a conversational understanding of modern astrophysics. Towards the end it starts to get a little preachy and pompous, but it wouldn’t be a Tyson production if that weren’t the case! Otherwise, it’s a pretty interesting short listen on some intriguing subjects such as dark matter, dark energy, gravity, and stars. I’ll give it a 75% recommendation
The San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge is west of Modesto and near where we see some of our patients. Most of the surrouding area is not this wet, but sometimes when driving you get a glimpse of local wetlands.
This upcoming weekend we plan on taking a weekend trip to San Fransisco! We are staying in an Airbnb just outside of Chinatown. As of right now nothing is booked, but we want to take a food tour and visit some of the popular tourist destinations and parks. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more!
Disclaimer: Patrick wrote this post but I (Erin) had to upload it because of some short-term electricity issues. Shout out to our landlord for getting it resolved quickly.