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What is work like as an Infectious Disease Specialist in a hospital setting?

This is the profession I want to enter and I wanted to know what to expect when entering the profession. #medicine #doctor #healthcare #hospital-and-healthcare

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Thank you comment icon Nikki, work life balance is awesome you can be an RN.RRT or MSc. we generally work 8 to 4 or 3 twelve hour shifts amd you can acquire a CIC certification from the epidemiology association. Also, an epidemiologist seeks new ways to improve hosptial policies on infection prevention.techniques. audit.initiate quality improvement projects etc. Melinda Marshall, DrPH, RRT-NPS
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Kim’s Answer

Nikki.

Answering this from a patient's perspective:

My elderly Dad had recurrent MRSA infections over a 3 year period. He was admitted I don't know how many times! Our hospital ID doctors also followed up with us outside the hospital. We have now been through three different ID doctors, and finally have one who we like. The first one was not being aggressive enough in getting to the root cause of the problem. The second one is semi-retired.

From what I saw, ID doctors have to interact a lot with the other doctors. My Dad's problems started with UTIs (urinary tract infections) and so we had a urologist. Then when they were looking for the source, they wanted to look at his heart, as he had recently gotten stents. So we had a cardiologist. It was difficult for us, because the doctors had conflicting opinions and WE ultimately had to decide whether to do a heart procedure. We said no.Then the hospitalist (primary care doctor) accidentally found the "colony" in his artificial hip socket, so then we had orthopedics. Oh, and then there was the time he started to go into kidney failure, so we had a kidney specialist. The doctors have to know what tests to run, and, more importantly, how to interpret the results.

Doctors also have to be able to deal with the families. My Dad is lucky, in that we have been problem-free for a year! But not everyone with infectious diseases will survive. You will learn over the course of your training to somehow be both compassionate and yet "emotionally detached."

There are few ID doctors. I think it is great that you are interested in this field, and wish you the best!
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Stephen’s Answer

As an infectious disease physician, every day is a little different. You are usually consulted to see patients in the hospital who have many different types of problems, including fevers, post surgery infections, HIV, hepatitis, illness after traveling, etc. This can be in the intensive care unit or in a regular hospital bed, depending on the severity of the illness. Some times, an infectious disease doctor is asked to help solve medical mysteries, when there is difficulty figuring out the cause of an illness or the origin of someone's fever or unusual symptoms. Infectious disease doctors also see patients in the office, either as their own patients that they follow (e.g. people with HIV) or as consults from other doctors, or as follow up from the hospital. Other medical issues include immunizations for travel, wound infections, and other complex problems. A great resource is the Infectious Disease Society of America website: https://www.idsociety.org/
Another great site is the American Medical Association: https://www.ama-assn.org/specialty/infectious-diseases

Stephen recommends the following next steps:

Spend a day with an infectious disease doctor to see what their day is like seeing patients
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