WORCESTER MEDICINE
Nursing Education Continued
6. Aiken, L. H., Clarke, S. P., Cheung, R. B., Sloane, D. M., & Silber, J. H. (2003). Educational levels of hospital nurses and surgical patient mortality. Journal of the American Medical Association, 290 (12), 1617-1623. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ articles/PMC3077115/ 7. Campaign for Action (2020). Welcome to the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action Dashboard. https://campaignforaction.org/ wp-content/uploads/2019/07/r2_ CCNA-0029_2019-Dashboard-Indicator-Updates_1-29-20.pdf 8. Spetz, J. (2018). Projections of progress toward the 80% Bachelor of Science in Nursing recommendation and strategies to accelerate change. Nursing Outlook, 66 (4), 394-400. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. outlook.2018.04.012 9. Massachusetts Department of Higher Education Nursing Initiative. (2016). Massachusetts Nurse of the Future Nursing Core Competencies©: Registered Nurse. https://www.mass. edu/nahi/documents/nofrncompetencies_updated_march2016.pdf 10. Angel, L. (2020). Best practices and lessons learned in academic progression in nursing: A scoping review. Journal of Professional Nursing, 36, 628-634. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2020.08.017 11. American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (2021). The Essentials: Core Competencies for Professional Nursing Education. American Association of Colleges of Nursing. https://www.aacnnursing.org/ Portals/42/AcademicNursing/pdf/ Essentials-2021.pdf
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My Journey Through the Match Kate Freeman, DO
T
he process through which fourth-year medical students
gain entry into residency programs — referred to as “the match”— initially filled me with trepidation and anxiety. Now, years down the line, I see it as a gateway into the next exciting opportunity. Residency is when freshly minted doctors finally get to test their mettle and develop their own identities as physicians — and the match is how they get there. So, whether you are a mentor to medical students or a medical student yourself, I hope you will gain some advice and encouragement from my story. I am a third-year internal medicine resident at UMass Memorial Medical Center and I will be going into hospital medicine at the end of this academic year. I went to medical school at the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine. I enjoy going on adventures with my husband, puttering in my garden and scuba diving. I am from Maine and I would like to remain in New England long term. When I was eight years old, I read a book about a nurse who rode through the Appalachian Mountains giving medical care to the impoverished families of the region. This inspiring story set me on the path toward medical school because I wanted to spend my life taking care of those in need. This dream solidified when my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer while I was in college. Thankfully she is now cancer-free, although the physical and emotional scars remain. Her journey, and my small part in it, was the final motivation I needed to enter medical school. Like all medical students, I completed two years of classroom learning and passed my first of four board exams before finally entering the world of clinical medicine. I completed my third-year clerkships at Eastern Maine Medical Center, now Northern Light, in Bangor, Maine. There, I saw the gamut of what medical subspecialties have to offer — from openheart surgery to inpatient child psychiatry to rare medical illnesses like autoimmune meningitis and primary CNS lymphoma. Ultimately, I chose internal medicine because I liked the variety of cases, the excitement of building and narrowing a list of differential diagnoses, and the relationships one forms with patients both in and out of the hospital. Finally, after about 18 months of clinical work and two more board exams, I was ready to enter the match process. On a fundamental level, the match has remained the same for decades. Each fall, all fourth-year medical students submit applications to a national governing body. They interview through the winter and submit a rank list in early spring. Then, the preferences of applicants and programs are entered into a proprietary algorithm designed to put as many applicants into as many spots as possible. Finally, every applicant finds out where they matched during the same week in March. That said, the landscape of the match is now shifting. When I applied in 2018, the osteopathic and allopathic matches were two distinct processes with different applications and deadlines. While I participated in the allopathic match successfully, I had to eschew the safer option of the osteopathic match to do so. This meant I had to apply to more programs than the average medical student. In the end, I applied to roughly thirty. Now that the matches are combined, the field has become more
SEPT / OCT 2021
