I chose this area because I feel that honing my outpatient counseling skills will allow me excel in my career in several facets. Outpatient counseling will allow me to spend more time with patients which is not always available in the acute setting, follow up visits will allow me to track progress and make changes in patient care methods. I am deeply interested in behavior change, behavioral health, motivational interviewing and methods to increase compliance and success within the Registered Dietitian’s scope of practice.

There were several projects I undertook during my time in the role. The first was working to renovate our current Nutrition Outpatient Visit note. At OMC we use the EMR Cerner. This was a big project for our IT staff, so we wanted to make sure that we were efficient with their time, and weren’t making revisions through the process if we didn’t need to. It was a great experience to connect with a different side of the OMC team and see what the process looks like for making changes in the EMR. It is remarkable how everything is interconnected in the system, and changes we thought would be simple can be very complex. We were able to effectively update the note to include more pertinent and useful information.

The second project I worked through was with our Bariatric Nurse working on updating our Pre-Procedure Bariatric diet booklet.

I learned so much about working with different professions, personalities, and communicators through this process. I tend to think of myself as an effective communicator already, but this was a great opportunity to work on my active listening. It was important to listen carefully to the people I am working with, whether it’s a patient or a colleague to make sure our time spent together was effective and efficient. Listening and assimilating the information they are giving me was an important part of making myself a better communicator.