How To Make An Urgent Care Shift Go By Faster

I just finished four 10-hour-shifts back-to-back in the urgent care. Even though these shifts were on a Thanksgiving weekend the patient volumes were way higher than the normal flow. I’m definitely drained mentally… but quite energized otherwise.

I have a coworker who is about my age, we get along perfectly. He is fast, doesn’t complain much and he is a good clinician. I can run things by him and he runs cases by me. He knows things that I would normally have no clue about and vice versa. We bring food from home, share food, take coffee breaks together, talk shit, laugh it up with the nurses… it’s like being on vacation.

On my lunch  breaks I don’t even bother leaving my station because I’d rather just shoot the shit with him. And no, I’m not having a man-crush here… I just really appreciate having someone who makes my workday so much easier.

When he was out on personal leave for 2 months I was ready to quit. That’s around the time I was writing my posts about going part-time. I had started working at this location just a year ago and I started working with him. So once he left and I was working mostly on my own that’s when I was focusing on all the negative stuff… this nurse is slow, that patient is mean, lab techs are so needy, the specialists are rude etc.

If him and I worked every shift together then I could do this gig for quite a few days in a row without breaking a sweat. It’s the camaraderie, being in the trenches together, covering for each other. If I’m having an off day and every x-ray looks equivocal I know he’ll take one glance and blow off my read. And if I’m in a grumpy mood he’ll make so much fun of me until I change my attitude.

Outside of work we don’t have much in common. He is the suave sort with women drooling over him, divorced with kids, kind of a heavy liquor, smoker type. I’m the skinny-scrawny, work-out-every-day, lounge at the coffee shop, read-books-sort-of-person. And I think that’s actually a good thing. We get enough of a break from each other to appreciate the work time that we have.

Find Your Work-Partner

If you can latch onto someone at work that is competent, supporting and upbeat then I would highly recommend building that bond. Sure, there are things you don’t like about that person, sure they have their idiosyncrasies but why get hung up on the details. You two can help each other through the onslaught of patients that walks in through the doors and walk out together victorious by the end of the day.