New Interns Don’t Imperil Patient Care

* I enjoyed your “first in a series” article on the life of the new interns at the Ventura County Medical Center. It brought back some memories.

However, I feel that your writer overdramatizes some of the activities of these new physicians to the extent that readers might feel if they are patients at the county hospital they will be guinea pigs.

Particularly the sentence ending with “using their unpracticed hands to deliver babies, inject IVs, set broken bones and remove appendixes.” This doesn’t reflect the structured program of supervision that the intern is under.

Ventura County Medical Center has a highly competent attending staff, under whose close scrutiny the interns work, as well as a laddered layer of supervision from their colleagues who are second- and third-year resident physicians.

Also your writer implies that in medical school the student is only in lectures and laboratories. Modern medical education in the United States has the majority of the third and fourth years with students having “hands-on” experience with patients, under close supervision and usually without the responsibility role.

If you or a family member becomes a patient at “the county,” rest assured you will be getting the highest quality of medical care.

F. WARREN LOVELL, M.D.

Ventura