Editorial
Front Page - Friday, November 5, 2010
Emergency medical physician dispels myths about the ER
David Laprad
Dr. DeAnn Champion is an emergency physician at Memorial Hospital. While she admits her job is challenging, she says many of the perceptions people have of emergency medicine as a result of popular television dramas like “Grey’s Anatomy” are inaccurate.
- David Laprad
The waiting area for the emergency department at Memorial Hospital is almost filled to capacity with people needing help. While doctors, physicians assistants and nurses are already attending to the patients needing urgent care, everyone there has a reason to believe the ER is where they need to be, and each person has brought a unique medical issue for the staff to resolve.
Inside, where a desk that stretches the length of a long hallway buzzes with activity, a radio occasionally crackles with news of an incoming trauma. Any moment, ambulance personnel could burst through the doors of the hospital with ... anything.
Then things could get really crazy.
Dr. DeAnn Champion, emergency physician at Mem-orial, has arrived for work and knows what’s waiting for her. Yet, she looks as cool as a cucumber.
“I don’t get nervous when there’s a lot going on; I deal with the task at hand. When a car hit a three-year-old outside the hospital, I stopped paying attention to everything else and dealt with my one sickest patient,” she says.
While the ability to zero in on a problem is an important quality for an emergency doctor to have, so is the ability to multi-task. Champion actually calls herself a multi-multi-
multi-tasker.
“The average emergency physician is interrupted at least 30 times an hour. I’ll be writing a set of admission orders, and someone will ask me to look at an EKG. Then I’ll go back to what I was doing and someone else will ask me to look at a cervical spine film, so I’ll look at that. And then someone else will tell me the patient in room 15 needs something for his pain,” she says.
While this is going on, Champion is keeping one ear on her physician’s assistants and the other on the radio.
“When a call comes in over the radio that they’re coming in hot, I’ll try to determine how far out they are so I can work what’s coming next in with what I’m doing,” she says.
The variety of urgent situations emergency physicians could potentially face doesn’t phase Champion. Instead, she relies on her training, experience and the expertise of others to pull her patients through.
“Emergency physicians are jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none. A big part of emergency medicine is knowing when to call for help and who to call. We do a lot of stabilization followed by calling someone to come help us. I can diagnose a heart attack and start the initial treatment, but then I’ll need to ask a cardiologist to put in a stent,” she says.
Champion says the most challenging aspect of her job is keeping up with the latest treatment strategies, especially with so much ground to cover. To that end, the American College of Emergency Physicians requires her to take 150 hours of continuing education every three years. Less formal, but equally valuable, training is available through Memorial’s newer emergency physicians.
“Whereas I have ten years of experience under my belt, the physicians we’ve added to our group over the last three years know the newest way to treat sepsis because they just finished training in that. So they help me keep my skills up,” she says.
While Champion has the medical skills necessary to do her job, she says an emergency physician must also be good with people, including patients and other doctors.
When it comes to patients, Champion says the ability to diffuse a tense situation can come in handy.
“One night, a lady was here with her mom, and as soon as we brought them back, I told her I was sorry they had to wait and that it had been a crazy night. I then said I knew her mom was sick and that we were going to start taking care of her immediately. She said she was prepared to yell at me, but because I was being so apologetic, she couldn’t.”
Champion is just as considerate with the other doctors.
“Your relationship with the medical staff at a hospital makes or breaks you when it comes to patient care. If I yell at them, they’re not going to be receptive to helping me, but if I’m congenial and respectful, they’ll bend over backward to help me.”
Champion is a myth-buster when it comes to what it’s like to be an emergency physician. She has a lot going on, but she’s able to cope, and while anything could happen, she has confidence in her training and skills. She laughs at how popular dramatic television dramas like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Hawthorne” portray emergency physicians and says little of what the programs show is realistic, including the long, exhausting hours and lack of personal time.
At Memorial, Champion works 16 nine-hour shifts per month. While the hours vary between days, nights and weekend, her schedule leaves her with enough time away from work to be a wife and a mother, and take care of other important matters. Her days are full, but she’s able to schedule herself to be home for her son’s birthday or take a motorcycle ride with her husband on a random Thursday?off.
While Champion says she does “OK” at striking a balance between work and home, her kids feel differently.
“They asked me today why I had to go to work again. They’re five and seven, so they’d like me to be around more,” she says.
What Champion’s children are too young to understand is that their mother has wanted to be a doctor since she was their age.
Champion’s mom was a medical technologist, and took her daughter to the hospital with her when she had to work. When Champion came of age, she earned a bachelors in psychology at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, Tenn., then went to Loma Linda University Medical Center in California. She completed her residency in Columbia, S.C., and then returned home to Chattanooga, where she plans to stay.
Champion plans to be an emergency physician for the foreseeable future, too, as she loves her job. She enjoys her patients (especially “little old people, who are so sweet”), likes that she doesn’t have to take care of the same issue or people over and over again and appreciates the freedom the position affords her when she’s off work.
“I’m might not have weekends off, but then again, I’m not working all day, then on call all night, and then working the next day,” she says.
Champion also likes the cutting edge nature of practicing medicine at Memorial. She’s especially proud of the cardiac work the hospital does and is excited about their efforts to provide the best possible care.
“We looked at what we could do to serve patients more quickly. So now, our paramedics will fax in an EKG, and we’ll be calling the cath lab before the patient ever arrives,” she says.
As Champion prepares to go on the clock, the waiting room is still full, the front desk is still buzzing with activity and at any moment, ambulance personnel could burst through the doors with another trauma. Then things could get really crazy.
But Champion is as cool as
a cucumber.
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