Work Experience Part 2

My work experience started very well, the dispensary manager, Jane, picked my up from my house, as she lived near me and took me with her to the practice.

The GP practice I was working at was located in a fairly large village next to the town where I lived. The practice was a converted house where the partners used to live, living upstairs, with their consultation rooms downstairs. They had eventually moved out after the practice expanded and moved upstairs, moving to a house across the road.

It was summer when I started and the practice looked inviting, with flowers in the garden and ivy growing on the front wall. The dispensary in this practice, where I was primarily to work, was fairly small and not staffed by a pharmacist but by two dispensers. They would receive all of the scripts from each consultation which the dispensary would then prepare while the patients waited in the waiting area.

The practice manager had obviously gone round and told everyone that I was starting and that my name was ‘work experience boy’, so everyone knew my name. However, Jane, the dispensary manager, seemed to believe my name was Liam and introduced me as such. Being nervous and wanting to make a good impression I didn’t correct this. The problem with taking an approach like this, I later found out, is that its very difficult to correct a mistake like this later on. Awkward questions come up, like “Why didn’t you correct me yesterday?”. Leaving that day, I thought what’s the worst that can happen?

Being called Liam for two months, while all the other nurses laugh, knowing that’s not your name, is apparently the worst that can happen. On my first day when I was introduced to the other dispenser, Yvonne, who furrowed her eye brows when Jane said my name. The second day, when jane was out of the room, she asked my what my name was and I told her.

“So why is Jane calling you Liam?”

I shrugged and told her I was too nervous to correct her. She obviously found this hilarious and from then on whenever Jane was in the room would say my ‘new’ name whilst slowly winking at me. The rest of the staff soon found this out and would continue to do the same. This got to a point that whenever I was checking a script and writing my initials, I was actually using the new initial I have been given by Jane.

This continued for two months, until one day my mum came into the practice to pick me up. I was in the store room and heard my mum say to Jane “Is ‘work experience boy’ here?”. I walked through into the main office to see Jane staring at me puzzled, then realisation suddenly dawning on her face. Not a single word was said about this between me and Jane, but from that moment on she used my actual name. She must have thought it was very strange that I had so willingly accepted this name, going so far as to change my initials.

My overall time at the practice was very useful and much less eventful, I got to see how the practice operated. The GP’s even let me sit in on a few consultations which was very interesting and I learned more about how consultations were structured to facilitate patient-doctor communication.