Pittsburgh Medical Student gaining experience in Phillips County

Jessica Smith, a student from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, has been working as a Physician Assistant Student at the Phillips County Hospital and Clinic (PCHC) since June 1 and will leave in the first week of August.

A rotation is an internship done by a student of medicine. Each student is required to do rotations in each medicinal field.

"I'm doing my Clinical Rotations in Family Medicine and Pediatrics with Dr. Medina," Smith told the PCN.

Upon hearing that she had an interest in rural medicine, Smith's Clinical Coordinator sent her to PCHC, which recently cracked the top 20 in Critical Access Hospitals in the U.S.

"I love it," Smith said. "Everybody's really, really nice. I haven't had anyone say 'no, I don't want a student in here. They told us to get out of Pittsburgh because a lot of the students don't get to do anything over there.'"

Smith, who is in her second rotation, says that working with Dr. Medina has allowed her to expand her knowledge of the medicine.

This isn't her first time being in the medical field. Smith was an X-ray Technician for a couple of years after studying radiology at Fairmont State in WV for two years.

"I worked midnights, so I would go to school during the day to get my bachelor's," Smith said noting that she also took online courses for Bluefield State College.

After Bluefield State, Smith started classes at Chatham for additional studies.

"I applied to ten schools up and down the east coast and I really liked Chatham when I went there for my interview," she said.

Being from Buckhannon, WV, she went to Chatham in an attempt to get out of small town life.

"Then I went to Pittsburgh and decided I wanted to get out of the city," Smith said. "It was a little different."

Being in Malta gives Smith a small break from a congested metropolis. After Malta, she will trek to Utah for a rotation in Psychology. Then Smith will go to West Virginia for her rotations in the Emergency Room and Cardiology. After that she will go to Virginia for Orthopedics.

Ultimately Smith believes she will find her niche in Family Medicine, which was her first of two rotations in Malta.

"You get experience in everything," she said. "A Physician Assistant needs to be in Family Medicine, Urgent Care or E.R. because you get into everything. If you go into something specialized then you forget everything, like all the simple stuff."

After graduating from high school, Smith had no intentions of being in the medical field.

"My original plan was to go to chef school," Smith said. "My father talked me out of it eventually but I did cooking competitions all over the state. That was my thing."

She went to X-ray school because she was "grossed out by blood." But after working in X-ray, Smith realized that the field involved more than just looking at scans.

"I just thought that I would be seeing broken bones all day but there's a lot more to X-ray than people think," Smith said. "I got exposed to gross stuff. As I got exposed to it, I started to like the trauma stuff more than I thought I ever would."

Seeing these incidents changed her thinking. She wanted to help, rather than sit behind a machine, only to see the patients leave.

"With X-ray you see the patient for ten minutes and then you send them on their way and you never know what came of it," Smith said.

Becoming a Physician Assistant will allow her to make a stronger impact in the lives of her future patients.