It is easy to become overconfident in medical and surgical care. There will be times in everyone’s career, whether you are a EMT, paramedic, nurse or physician, where you seem to grasp all the fundamentals of your profession. I put forward, this is the time when you need to work hardest to increase your knowledge and experience.

My first experience with patient care was as an EMT providing basic and then advanced life support. Your first 100 calls or so will include some cases where you are over your head, but you will almost certainly have someone more experienced with you. You will often think in those situations “hey I could have handled that if I was alone”. The very nature of clinical care is that you are not tested every day, there are a lot of easy days, and even some easy weeks or months. There will be many straightforward cases where we joke “it doesnt seem like any neurons need to fire” to take care of things adequately. To be ready when a case comes along that requires advanced decision making and skill, you have to constantly try to find those situations that make you uncomfortable, whether that is getting an airway in a child on a highway at 3AM, or putting in a subclavian line in a 300 pound woman with a massive GI bleed and a pressure of 60. Your mentors cant find these uncomfortable situations for you, they cant read your mind and they don’t know what you have experienced and what you haven’t. You need to constantly think “what if I had to do this in the worst circumstances, could I do it?” and if the answer is no or maybe, go to someone more senior and talk about it, and then ask them to give you some tips on how to get the job done in those circumstances.

Another point in a clinician’s evolution where overconfidence can be harmful is when they know the simple stuff, and move to the intermediate phase of training. At that point, your breadth of experience is actually quite low, but you’ve mastered the simple things and are looking forward to challenges. You may be the highest level resident at night in the hospital for the first time, or be the 1:1 nurse for a very sick patient for the first time, or it could be the first time you are the medic in charge at a complex scene. This is the point where you are moving from calling for help reflexively, to not calling for help and handling things yourself. The major problem in this transition, is that there is usually no competency assessment (I know that outstanding fire and EMS agencies do test people at this juncture, but it is not universal). In medicine, this transition usually occurs on July 1 between the first and second year for internists, and July 1 between the 2nd and 3rd years for surgeons. We don’t routinely “test” your ability to transition, and be certain you possess those cognitive skills you will need, we just move you from one set of tasks to another. Often, you are bored with your novice tasks, and ready for something more challenging. But you dont know what you dont know (or as Donny Rumsfeld would say, you have”unknown unknowns”).

It is vital before this transition to eat a meal with your Chief residents, or experienced nurses or medics (>3-5 years experience) and ask them “what was the hardest situation to handle when you became the decision maker? How did you handle it? What do you wish you had learned before that day arrived? Don’t do this the day after the transition, but a month before, when you will have the time to fill those gaps, and practice those situations with the most risk. But even if you do all that, and think you’re ready, you need to have a low threshold for “loading the boat” when things are not going smoothly. Even if you’ve practiced these new evolutions in your mind, there are always variables in the real world you cant anticipate. The people that know about those variables are the people who have already passed this stage. Their overconfidence has transitioned into competence (hopefully) and you need to use them as a resource. If they don’t want to help, find someone else. If no one in your organization wants to help, work somewhere else.

JY