101 primary care case studies : a workbook for clinical and beside skills
(Book)

101 Primary Care Case Studies offers real-life patient scenarios and critical thinking exercises to help you work through a patient’s chief complaint. Through narrative case studies, you will determine how best to diagnose, treat, and manage your patient based on the history of present illness, review of systems, relevant history, and physical examination findings. This workbook will ask probing questions to help you determine differential and most likely diagnoses, diagnostic tests to order, and appropriate patient management strategies using relevant and timely references to support your decisions. The organization of each case study simulates the patient care journey from chief complaint to outcome. Serving as a virtual clinical preceptor, this workbook can be used independently or in a classroom setting. It is accompanied by a robust online student supplement that provides answers to all questions, real outcomes of the cases, and valuable personal insights from the authors on how the patient was successfully managed. Not only will this workbook help you work through patient cases clinically, it will also share important, but often overlooked, bedside manner skills needed to successfully communicate with and care for your patients. Covering conditions across all organ systems and across the lifespan, this workbook is organized by chief complaint, providing an authentic perspective on what to expect in the patient care environment. It even includes information on pathophysiology and how to use ICD-10 and CPT (E/M) codes in your documentation. The book uniquely weaves together both the science and art of medicine by including personal insights into quality and compassionate care.

Editor: Sampath (Sam) Wijesinghe, DHSc, MS, MPAS, PA-C, CPAAPA, AAHIVS In the Central valley of California, including the suburbs of Fresno, there is a network of four hospitals and approximately 90+ community care clinics operating together as Adventist Health. Dr. Wijesinghe has been in practice for five years at the community care center in Sanger, a small city of approximately 25,000. (3zThere are eight family medicine clinicians at our clinic,(3y says Dr. Wijesinghe, (3zMy family practice patient pool includes newborn, pediatric, adolescent, adult, and geriatrics. I see about 20 – 24 patients daily, the majority of whom are of Hispanic or Latino population. About half of my patients are over the age of 50.(3y Dr. Wijesinghe began his HIV/AIDS clinical fellowship in 2013 and has been taking care of HIV/AIDS patients since that time. Before his time in California, Wijesinghe obtained two Masters Degrees, one in Master of Science in Management Information Systems with MBA from the University of Nebraska and his Master of Physician Associate degree from Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska. While in Nebraska Wijesinghe worked as a Surgical Assistant at Methodist Hospital and also as a Manager/Trainer at a health care company in Omaha. Says Wijesinghe, (3zI decided to concentrate on medicine, which has been dear to my heart from my childhood.(3y Wijesinghe left Nebraska accepting a job opportunity from Adventist Health Central Valley Network in California to start working in a family medicine clinic. While working at the Adventist Health clinic, he was invited to complete an HIV/AIDS clinical fellowship with University of California San Francisco’s Fresno Family and Community Medicine Department. Here he worked as an HIV testing coordinator in Fresno and Kern counties; an opportunity for Wijesinghe to educate clinicians, administrators, and patients. Recalls Wijesinghe, (3zAt the beginning of my commitment as the HIV testing coordinator in Fresno and Kern counties, I spent a few days at a HIV specialty clinic to experience and learn more about HIV+ patients. During my first day, I met two individuals who touched my heart in a very special way to initiate and continue to work in the HIV field. One individual was an HIV+ child who was the same age as my daughter. Unfortunately, she was born with the disease. While I treated the child I decided that I would like to make a difference in the HIV field by becoming more involved. The other individual I met was a young adult who had newly tested positive and was at the very beginning of the disease, so his HIV is well controlled and he is having a very healthy lifestyle. After hearing his story I thought that I needed to be an advocate to promote HIV screening, so that we will be able to detect patients early and start treatments, so that they can live a normal lifestyle.(3y Wijesinghe is currently a principal faculty at MSPA program, Stanford school of medicine. Looking to the future, Dr. Wijesinghe hopes we can achieve an AIDS-free generation. Says, Dr. Wijesinghe, (3zI would like to see no children born with HIV in the United States and a decrease internationally as well. At this time, the number of HIV cases are increasing in our youth, so I hope more education will be provided to our youth. I am not sure if we will have a vaccine to prevent HIV in the next decade, but I can definitely see that PrEP will be widely used.(3y Dr. Wijesinghe is passionate about encouraging PA students (future clinicians) to consider HIV medicine as a specialty in their future practice. Because of the current and projected HIV provider shortage, he has initiated this effort with his colleagues at AAHIVM. Dr. Wijesinghe has given lectures to several PA programs in the subject of HIV specialty for PAs with the aim that PAs will step up alleviating the HIV provider shortage.